Dear John,
If you follow me on social media or Substack, you’ve heard me railing about Trump’s attack on the American mind a lot recently.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media. And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.
There are five facets to Trump’s authoritarian attack on the American mind: gutting education, dismantling science, suppressing the media, attacking the arts, and rewriting history.
The last two facets explain why Trump is attacking the Smithsonian.
As President Trump seeks to extort the Smithsonian Institution and distort the story of America to serve his narrow ideological agenda, we are at risk of losing something even more crucial than any specific funding – we are at risk of losing the historical truth itself.
The Smithsonian is the most prominent national space where the full scope of American history is preserved and shared. These museums, free to the public on the National Mall, document not just triumphs, but also the deep inequalities that have shaped our country – slavery, colonization, segregation, gender-based oppression, and systemic injustice.
Trump’s worldview denies the reality of these inequalities – and that’s precisely his intention for the prized museums that hold our collective memory: to permanently erase the stories of Americans who have long been marginalized.
Trump’s executive order, misleadingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” is in fact an attempt to whitewash the past. It threatens to strip up to $1.3 billion in federal funding from the Smithsonian unless it conforms to a narrow, revisionist vision of U.S. history – one that has no place for the contributions, struggles, and realities of Black Americans, Native peoples, women, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Here’s the deal: the Smithsonian Board of Regents doesn’t have to do Trump’s bidding. Will you sign and send a direct message to the Board demanding they stand firm, protect the truth, and preserve the historical record for future generations now?
This is a classic authoritarian tactic: erase the past, control the present, and dictate the future. But the Smithsonian stands in the way, as a living, evolving record of who we are and how far we’ve come.
From the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), to the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), to the planned American Women’s History Museum, these institutions are essential not only to education, but to justice.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch has declared that “our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship.” Now it is up to the Smithsonian Board of Regents to uphold that commitment. Although the Board includes Vice President J.D. Vance, it also includes members of Congress, private citizens, and Chief Justice John Roberts, so our voices still have leverage.
We must insist these Board members act with conscience and clarity.
What do we lose if we allow these cultural pillars to be torn down? We lose the chance for our children – and their children – to understand how power, injustice, and perseverance have shaped this nation. We lose the opportunity to learn from our past so that we can build a better future.
Sign and send your message now. The truth is worth defending.
Thank you for asserting that we, as a nation, still value an honest, inclusive account of our history. If we fail to protect it, we may never recover what is lost.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
