How will the executive Order of Trump influence the Smithsonian?

The Trump government quickly moved to eliminate what it regards as “awake ideology” of the country’s art and cultural institutions.

Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order This focuses on two recipients of federal funds: the Smithsonian Institution, a huge collection of research centers, museums and galleries, including the Air & Space Museum and the American Art Museum; and the monuments and memorials under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.

What does the order say?

The order will be “restoring truth and common sense in American history” and the White House says The aim is to “revitalize important cultural institutions and to reverse the spread of division of ideology.”

It says that the Smithsonian ‘stories that display American and Western values ​​as inherently promote harmful and oppressive’.

But Jim Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, says: “It gives the work of the Smithsonian, that one of the major research institutions in the world is wrongly displayed. The argument that the Smithsonian misleads people in one way or another is somehow not true.

Nevertheless, the order is vice-president JD Vance-Die is part of the board of the Smithsonian-Om “incorrect, division or anti-American ideology” from the museums to eliminate and to work with the congress to finance exhibitions or programs that “Americans share by RAS”.

It postpones the upcoming American Women’s History Museum, which does not yet have a physical building, and recommends that it does not ‘recognize men as women’. This is how the Trump administration has been referred to transgender women. An exhibition compiled the museumThe fact that is currently in the National Museum of American History includes a T-shirt of a trans, non-bites athlete.

The executive command also sends the Ministry of the Interior, which supervises the national parks and other public land, to restore markers, images and other memorials that “have not been removed or changed in the past five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or to minimize or minimize or dismiss certain historical figures or events.”

Five years ago, in 2020, images throughout the country were illegible or demolished as part of the Black Lives Matter protests. But national parks and historic locations throughout the country have also revised their messages to reflect a more complicated concept of American history, which not only includes American performance, but also the land abdomen, such as the slave ownership of the founders, the invisibility of LGBTQ people in a great part of the Dutch country, and taking the Indian country.

A portrait of President Trump in the America’s presidents Exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in May 2021.

Win McNamee/Getty images

Hide caption

Schakel Caption

Win McNamee/Getty images

What is possible for the administration?

The Smithsonian is not a federal agency-it is a public-private partnership. But it receives federal funds, and its employees are a mix of civil servants and people with ‘trust fund positions“Those roles are funded by sources that include business activities and subsidies.

The administrative body is a Council of Regents, whose members are the Vice President, the supreme judge of the United States, three senators, three representatives and nine civilians. In the executive order, Trump said that Vice President JD Vance would collaborate with the congress to appoint citizens who were broadly in accordance with the order.

It is not clear what power the administration currently has about the Council of Regents, but the order connects future financing to compliance.

What is the Smithsonian reaction?

The Smithsonian has not yet released an explanation.

But in response to an executive order in January of President Trump, who forbids organizations that received federal funds of operational diversity, stock and inclusion programs, it closed its diversity agency.