Historians resist Trump's effort to police the past

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Historians resist Trump’s effort to police the past
Attempts to reshape the Smithsonian reflect a broader campaign to control public memory and what Americans learn

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published March 2, 2026 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) Donald Trump is an instinctive authoritarian. This is the defining feature of his personality and political life. Since his return to power, he has become much more extreme, ambitious and dangerous. Such leaders know that controlling the past is how you win the present — and lay the groundwork for commanding the future. These types of bad actors will never be satisfied in their quest to remake society in their ideological and personal image.

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A recent Washington Post story documents how a group of historians, scholars and volunteers are pushing back against the Trump administration’s attempts to remake the Smithsonian museum system in the name of patriotic education — what is in practice a Trump-MAGA indoctrination program — and to purge “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from other sites of public memory, such as memorials and national parks.

References to Trump’s impeachment and role in Jan. 6 and attempts to nullify the 2020 Election, had been removed by Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. But this winter, James Millward, a 64-year-old historian, decided to turn the museum into a teaching space where he corrected the historical record by handing out printouts which told the truth: Trump was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”

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Henry Giroux, social theorist and author of “Assassins of Memory,” a book that examines the politics of erasure, was not surprised. He framed what happened to Millward in even starker terms, calling it “not merely an administrative dispute over what counts as art or what is culturally important.” Giroux said, It is an attempt to discipline public memory by intimidating those who refuse to narrate the nation as innocent. History must serve authority rather than interrogate it. The Smithsonian is being turned into an apparatus of ideological containment.” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/02/historians-resist-trumps-effort-to-police-the-past/