For years, ordinary Americans have walked into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History expecting to see the story of their country told with pride.
What they got instead has a lot of people furious.
And now President Trump signed an executive order targeting the museum’s alleged ideological capture — and a Texas Republican is demanding heads roll.
Warning Signs Outside the Smithsonian
President Donald Trump signed an executive order recently directing federal officials to install warning signs along National Park Service-maintained sidewalks and walkways outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The signs will inform visitors about a White House Domestic Policy Council report accusing the museum of what the administration called “thinly veiled anti-Americanism” and “extreme political activism.”
The order states that the signage will “notify visitors that the Museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the Report and direct visitors to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.”
Trump also directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, and the administrator of the General Services Administration to “use all available authorities” to enforce the order’s policies.
Because the Smithsonian operates as an independent agency outside direct executive branch control, Trump cannot simply walk in and rewrite the exhibits. So the White House went around the building — literally — using federal sidewalks that fall under National Park Service jurisdiction to make the administration’s objections impossible to miss.
The move builds on Trump’s March 2025 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents to eliminate what the administration described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s museums. The July 4 White House report released shortly before the new order accused the museum of failing to present history “in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”
Gill Goes After the Director
Representative Brandon Gill (R-TX) appeared on Fox & Friends Weekend to back the executive order and push for something more permanent: firing National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig.
“The American people are so sick of seeing the left take control of iconic American institutions,” Gill said.
“They want to see a museum that’s funded by taxpayers that is promoting patriotism, that promotes American ideals and values, and instead they get this kind of woke nonsense.”
Gill had already confronted Hartig directly at a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past.” The exchange became one of the more jaw-dropping moments of the congressional session.
Gill asked Hartig whether it was important to be polite. She said yes. He then pointed out that the museum’s own Mass Action Toolkit listed politeness as a defining characteristic of white supremacy culture.
After Hartig conceded that objectivity is “one of the goals of history,” Gill noted that the same document promoted by the museum claimed that “objectivity is a core and defining aspect of white supremacy culture.”
Gill then asked Hartig directly whether Mickey Mouse is racist. After she said no, he walked her through an exhibit claiming the character represented “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackfaced minstrelsy.”
Gill’s questioning was so effective that Donald Trump Jr called it “worth watching.”
Hartig pushed back throughout. “The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates,” she said. “We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all its breadth so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions.”
And she defended the museum’s broader approach: “When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we do not mean erasing it. We mean adding the evidence, voices and objects that earlier tellings left out so that more Americans can see themselves in the national story.”
She also told lawmakers the museum’s work is “governed by the Smithsonian standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence, and nonpartisanship.”
But the hearing did not go smoothly for her. Republican members also pressed Hartig about sexually charged exhibits, including one called Girlhood: It’s Complicated, which featured diary excerpts from a young girl asking about male genitalia. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), who chaired the subcommittee, said he felt the institution had “become infected by a woke ideology that seeped into public displays, educational materials and planning documents.”
What This Really Means for the Smithsonian’s Future
Gill put it plainly on Fox & Friends Weekend: “This is the first time, I think, that we’ve had a president who takes this stuff seriously, who doesn’t just look the other way and allow the left to continue their long march through the institutions and continue shoving leftism down our throats and down the throats of our children.”
That’s not a throwaway line. The left’s decades-long strategy of embedding ideological priorities inside cultural institutions — universities, newsrooms, museums — has largely worked because no one in power ever pushed back in any serious way. The Smithsonian is federally funded and sits on the National Mall. It draws millions of visitors a year, many of them families with children who believe they’re getting an honest account of the country they live in.
What they’ve been getting, according to the White House’s 162-page report, is something closer to a political document dressed up as history.
And the Smithsonian’s independence cuts both ways. Yes, it limits what Trump can directly mandate. But it also means Hartig and her team have been operating for years with minimal accountability to the taxpayers who fund the institution. Congress controls the Smithsonian’s budget. That’s a lever Republicans haven’t fully pulled yet.
The warning signs going up outside the museum are, in one sense, a workaround. But they’re also a statement. Every family that walks past those signs on the way into the building will know the federal government believes what’s inside cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly. That’s not nothing.
Gill’s call to fire Hartig isn’t new — he’s been pushing it for some time. But with the executive order now signed and the July 4 report formally in the record, the political pressure on the Smithsonian’s board just got considerably heavier. Vice President JD Vance sits on that board. The government controls the institution’s funding. The Smithsonian can claim independence all it wants, but it can’t claim independence from the consequences of what it puts on the walls.
The question now is whether Republicans treat this as a genuine priority or let it fade the way so many institutional battles fade — with a few tough hearings, some good clips for social media, and nothing that actually changes.
Gill, at least, seems to understand the stakes. The left didn’t capture these institutions overnight, and they won’t be reclaimed without a fight.
Sources: Fox News, AOL News, yournews.com, The Washington Times, Townhall, The Blaze, NBC News, US News & World Report