Title: President Trump Comes for the Museums

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley is with us now to talk about this moment in America as we continue to ask on this show, "Is this what democracy looks like?" Brinkley was quoted in the New York Times article on Tuesday about President Trump ordering the Smithsonian Institution to adjust the "tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals" of the Smithsonian's historical and artistic exhibitions.

The president posted this week that "the Smithsonian is out of control, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been, nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future." This all comes after an earlier executive order back in March that directed the Smithsonian to "remove improper ideology." The AP says that order covers all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

It's not just the Smithsonian, which is a federal government-related institution. Last week, Trump posted that he would be using government power to influence the ideology of the nation's private museums as well. He said, "I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities." This all comes just as Trump announced his hand-picked list of awardees for this year's Kennedy Center honors to get away from artists he considers woke.

He has also suggested that they rename that institution the Trump Kennedy Center. The AP reminds us that in the executive order in March, Trump singled out for criticism the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian, which opened in 2016 near the White House, the Women's History Museum, which is in development, and the American Art Museum. This comes after some other history-related directives.

Here's a reminder of one from a New York Times headline from June. Trump says, Army bases will revert to Confederate names. Interesting from that article, it said Trump would skirt the law that mandates the removal of Confederate symbols from the military in this way. They would restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials.

An example they gave was when Trump said the Army would be restoring the name of a base in Virginia to Fort Robert E Lee. The Army said the base would be renamed to honor Private Fitz Lee, a member of the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers who was awarded a Medal of Honor after serving in the Spanish-American War. That's from the New York Times. Fitz Lee. Of course, we can say Trump's statement left no doubt about which Lee the base was really being renamed for.

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, a CNN presidential historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the author of many books, including ones about presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter. His bio page reminds us that he was personally selected by Nancy Reagan to edit President Ronald Reagan's presidential diaries. That was in 2011. He even won a Grammy Award for best jazz ensemble, of all things, for co-producing Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom. We'll give you a little bit of that before we end. Professor Brinkley, we always appreciate when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Brinkley: Glad to be back.

Brian: Could you just start by giving our listeners an overview of what the Smithsonian Institution is, what its official mission is, and a little about the scope of what they offer?

Professor Brinkley: The Smithsonian is really what we used to call the attic of Americuts, where many of our artifacts or papers, things that we treasure, are kept. It's expanded, as you mentioned, into numerous units, and there really has been no problem with the Smithsonian. Some years ago, there was an argument about the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, whether that should be in an air and space museum, and became a great history controversy.

By and large, everybody's been very happy in recent decades with the incredible work the Smithsonian's done. It seems to me that this whole controversy is just President Trump wanting to destroy what he considers woke culture in America and going overboard with it, and interfering in places that don't need interfered with, because certainly, if you're going to have an African American museum of history, you're going to be following the timeline of the Middle Passage and slavery to explain one of the most dramatic forces in American history that led to the Civil War.

Then, of course, follow it up with what happened through Jim Crow and eventually the heroism of the modern civil rights movement. That would only be a natural thing to do. There seems to be a particular animus going on by the Trump administration about Black American history and women's history. I believe those are the two targets, along with LGBTQ, that are going to be targeted to do an erasure of what's there now, and hope that they can control history in the future. That's something usually that happens in an authoritarian country.

Brian: Listeners, who has ever visited the Smithsonian or has any question, has a take or a question on any branch of the Smithsonian or the larger questions of how American history is or should be presented to students and museum goers, or the use of government power to direct the narrative of that government by private institutions? Is this the arts and culture branch of a new authoritarianism, or any questions for historian Douglas Brinkley? 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692.

What Trump posted on Tuesday, Professor Brinkley, about the Smithsonian specifically was this: "The Smithsonian is out of control, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been. Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future." Do you agree with that critique to any degree that the emphasis in the historical exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums tends to focus too much on the negative, on who got oppressed by whom as part of the American story, real as they may be, and downplays the successes of American democracy and American cultural advancement, and advancement of human rights over time, things like that?

Professor Brinkley: No, I think it's a completely false narrative being spewed by the President. The truth of the matter is, all aspects of American empowerment, including Black American empowerment, are covered at the Smithsonian. You could go see Chuck Berry's Red Cadillac or the prayer hymnal book of Harriet Tubman or the great paintings of many Black artists like Romare Bearden. It's rich as can be, and it seems to be connected to this Confederate monument.

Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans took down a Robert E Lee statue some years back. He was on his way out as mayor, and that started triggering this idea of the de-Confederizing of the country. That started triggering a cultural war, and it exploded at Charlottesville, which Trump tried to say there are good people on both sides of the equation. Now in his second term, he's being very ardent. He wants to scrub progressivism, anything that's considered DEI at a university. He wants to attack the idea that this isn't a country built by white heroes.

Hence, President Trump wants to build a hero's garden in the Black Hills of South Dakota, putting statues up of people that he admires, including Davy Crockett and William F Buckley and Milton Friedman, and it's a random list of people, some highly deserving of it, by the way, of such a thing. This is where he's playing it. He sees that getting control of the universities, busting up the media, and going after the way people are taught history.

We always have to remember when we deal with the idea of a red and blue America, red America's the South. It's the Confederate South. Just look at a map and you will see. This is like the old Charlie Daniels song, The South's Gonna Do It Again. It wasn't a lost cause in the South, Trump's saying that your Confederate ancestors were heroes. This is part of what he's trying to do to minimize that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Instead, there's something coming out of the right that slavery was not that big a deal, only a couple percentage points of Southerners actually had slaves. It's trying to even rewrite the Civil War right now.

Brian: Why? Before we go to some callers. Allen in Woodbridge, we see you. You're going to be first. What do you think Trump wants from this kind of revisionism? Is it to clear the name of his own father who had racial discrimination cases against him as a landlord, as did Trump himself at one point, or to deepen the political support of those white Americans who think they're the discriminated against ones in this country today, or just out of personal racial animus, if you want to get in his head? Why do all this?

Professor Brinkley: All that you mentioned are components, I believe. I think, though, in the end, he feels it's a winning ticket that he has to keep his MAGA base together. He's a president operating, on a good day, at 40% approval. In order to stay at 40% and not drop down to 35%, he has to continue to show that he's a cultural warrior, that he's not ready to say that the United States is a majority non-white, non-Caucasian nation. Hence, he's attacking issues that nobody else in politics, except fringe person like David Duke, would have suggested, and he has the entire Republican Party going along with it.

The Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, they're the party of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan. They'd all be turning over in their graves if to realize that Trump, as America is turning 250 years old on this coming July 4th, is trying to divide us instead of unite us. In that sense of division, he feels strength. He feels that as long as he keeps things chaotic, he's controlling the narrative, he can push buttons. A lot of this will come back. Trump won't be here forever, and the Smithsonian will come back, and whenever displays are taken down, they'll be put back up, probably. Statues that get re-put up can be re-taken down.

It's just not very helpful for America in the 21st century to look at how can we bring America back to a segregationist era, and how do we stop teaching Black history as the true story of indigenous people or the expansion of women's history that's been going on the last decades. He wants to rip-tie all that back to really a, call it 1950s America, or even further back than that.

Brian: Allen in Woodbridge, you're on WNYC with presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. Hi, Allen.

Allen: Good morning to both of you. I worked in Washington for 16 years. The first year, I worked at Langley. I had a top-secret security clearance. I'm African American. Brian, my last job before I came back to Jersey, right after 9/11, I worked at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington. My great-grandmother was a slave in Savannah, and my grandmother was born in Savannah, then came to Boston, and then came to New Jersey. My mom taught school for 35 years. She died a few years ago. I've been to all the Smithsonian's. I worked right there on D Street. I worked right by the World Bank. I was all over Washington.

When I saw that he's trying-- First of all, you can't erase history. It already happened. Everything that happened in this country wasn't fantastic. It doesn't mean that some things weren't fantastic. There was a lot of fantastic stuff, but there was also a lot of dark stuff. One thing, I don't know, people like Trump and all these racist folks, if it wasn't for Black people, we wouldn't even have a United States. Remember, we picked all the food, we raised all the slave owners' kids. My grandmother told me a whole bunch of stories when I was younger. I don't know what he's trying to do, but it's asinine to like the 400th power. That's pretty much all I have to say. You guys have a good one.

Brian: Allen, thank you for your call. I'm going to go right on to Aaron in Branchburg, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Aaron. Aaron, you there? All right. We'll come back to Aaron. Aaron, it looks like has to be talking to somebody else for the moment. Following up on one of your previous answers, Professor Brinkley, and really on what the caller was saying from Woodbridge, you've been a leading American historian for decades now. He talked about, or you talked about a 1950s version of history.

Do you think that over time, the ratio of the sort of good versus bad take on American history has shifted? Would people visiting the Smithsonian or taking history classes at Rice, where you teach, or choose your context, if they knew nothing coming in, would have gone out with a warmer, fuzzier feeling about American history in, say, 1955 than they would today in 2025?

Professor Brinkley: It's an interesting question. The way I would answer is that there was more of an American triumphalism, an American exceptionalism, presented. Let's just pick the 1950s, meaning we just won World War II, and the country was in a consumer boom, but it was still a period where African Americans could not vote. There was housing discrimination. Women were considered to be consigned to the home or a few secretarial nursing jobs.

Native American history hadn't been really examined to the point where somebody like Andrew Jackson, who's still on our $20 bill, and still has Jackson, Mississippi named after him, and Jacksonville, Florida, and we all honor Andrew Jackson, but we hadn't really had the dialogue about the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee removal and essentially a genocide of people. It does come out, as the last caller said, you do have to talk about it. We are, at least at our institutions, like Smithsonian, better informed of real American history now, better than ever before.

If you're talking about fantasy history or a nostalgia for a manifest destiny that God wants us to do whatever we do, even foreign wars, then things have shifted. That shift really occurred, not at the Smithsonian. It occurred in the 1960s and '70s, when there started becoming a deeper look at how to examine American history, where people would start taking Black studies, or you could take classes on US labor history. It opened the net up.

Even as recently as Barack Obama's presidency, Obama signed executive orders creating national monuments like Stonewall in New York for LGBTQ people, like Charles Young for the Buffalo Soldiers, a monument in Ohio, Harriet Tubman sites. He created, Obama, the César Chávez National Monument in California for the United Farm Workers. He was opening up the net, President Obama, of not taking away from James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, but adding to the stories of America by telling a larger story that wasn't just about white America.

Brian: What you're really saying is history is communicated differently now at many colleges and museums because a shift needed to take place, that a revision needed to take place toward a more full, more objective story rather than a cheerleading project of American history, if I should call it that, because it was too cheerleading and buried the dark sides too much in earlier generations. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Professor Brinkley: Yes. If you're talking about right after World War II, women who weren't going to universities like they are now, they weren't even allowed in. A man I've written about named Colonel Earl Rudder, a hero of the US Army Rangers at Normandy at Pointe du Hoc, Rudder's Rangers, he had to come into Texas A&M and start breaking it open so women could come in after the war. In the '50s, we had a McCarthyism, which tried to do what Trump's doing, is trying to say, you were once a writer who sympathized with Lenin, or you were somebody who was for Eugene Debs for president in the 1920s, and tried to Blacklist them. The Blacklist was another attempt at shutting people up, of controlling our very diverse and rich history in the way we express things in the arts.

The differences in the '50s McCarthyism, while it became a red scare, McCarthy was, in the end, seen as a rogue senator from Wisconsin whose power was limited. With President Trump, he has really unlimited executive power for at least the next few years to try to do an assault on the Smithsonian Institute and redefine public education and public history at a time when our schools don't have the budgets that they need, our teachers don't have the budgets. Most students know nothing about any history, let alone trying to break down institutions that are doing a great job right now, like the Smithsonian is, at all of its facilities.

Brian: We're going to try Aaron in Branchburg, who I think we have now. Hi, Aaron. You're on WNYC.

Aaron: Good morning, Brian. Excuse the wind. Just listening to the last few minutes of the conversation, I've been a Smithsonian buff since I was a little boy. I'm 45 now. I've been going to Smithsonian since I was probably five, six years old. Beautiful institution. There's so many things to see, so many things to learn. I think that we're on the preface of a dangerous point. There's a phrase that I've coined: "A fascist will never admit that they practice fascism." They're usually called fascist by other people, but they will never admit to that.

Our history, when you break the word down, "his story," you can try to what they call it, "whitewash" or what have you. These museums represent our truth, not just history, it's truth because his story, it all comes down to who controls the narrative. Keep it all out there. Our children, everyone in the country deserves the opportunity to learn about, we have a lot of things to be proud of as a nation, and we have things that aren't so proud. We have a little bit of a dark path, but that still needs to be displayed because if you don't know where you come from, how do you know where you're going? You don't want to repeat the past.

This is such a beautiful country with people from every part of the world. You can't find diversity like this. I know that term, that DEI term, is not favored by President 47, but it's what makes our country so beautiful. The fact that I can go eat Thai food, there's different music, and different cultures. We need to appreciate more of that, keep our minds open. I don't subscribe to the term woke. We need to keep our minds open because that's where our next generation of leaders, parents, everything will come from. I just hope that we can really keep the Smithsonian, keep it pure. Keep it true and keep it pure. All right. You got it.

Brian: Thank you very, very much. So interesting, Professor Brinkley, to hear Aaron and all his thoughts, and in the context of somebody who says he's 45 years old and he's been a Smithsonian buff since he was five. He used the word fascist. To pull the lens back to a global and historical view for you, is the way Trump is using government power to influence the narrative about his government and the history, maybe the history of his favorite constituents, is that consistent with authoritarian governments around the world over time? What word would you use?

Professor Brinkley: Yes, it's authoritarianism run amok, and it's going right at the jugular of our national heritage. It is an attempt to rewrite history, to do away with truths and replace it with a kind of fake narrative, one that may have existed in the past. I've noticed the Trump administration liking to talk about William McKinley's tariffs and the manifest destiny of James K Polk or the story of Andrew Jackson, but they limit the history. Our caller was talking about the cultural richness and diversity. Our professional historians know what they're doing. They're working very hard to understand all aspects of the American project. The good news is, we are the exemplary country.

It is astounding how we've overcome adversity. Just how important it is that we are the Ellis Island or the Port of Houston of the world, a place people want to come. Nobody at the Smithsonian is trying to ever put down the United States. It's trying to talk and explain what happened. If it's about the American Revolution, they might talk about Molly Pitcher, who gets written out of the narrative back then. If it's about a modern era, they'll explain how Julia Childs worked as a spy while she was the great cook.

You just go on and on with fun, interesting things that have happened, and it's not broken. It's the opposite, Smithsonian soaring, having its greatest time ever, and President Trump just is coming in with a wrecking ball attitude, which is just an extension of his political views in a revenge tour he has against people that he perceives as being liberal and not 100% Trump, and that's authoritarianism. I'll rewrite the history to match Trump history, just like you mentioned, he wants the Trump name ahead of the Kennedy Center.

Brian: To end on what you just said about taking a wrecking ball, when Trump talks about the Smithsonian in particular, he's talking about an institution that the federal government mostly supports financially and is part of the basic tourist experience in the nation's capital. Then he also posted this last week, addressing every museum in America, most of them private institutions, as you know, "I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities." What do you think he's talking about there? Because I think a shudder went through the leaders and the patrons of museums all over the country. Do many history museums around the country get federal funding? Does he have power there?

Professor Brinkley: It will vary. There are some that get federal funding. He will probably try to talk to governors in red states or people he's friendly with to change some of the way history is being explained. Often the museums are in urban centers, history centers, around the country. Yet in those cities may be blue, but the state is red. It's not a Republican history he's trying to do. I think really, he wants to go back to when white Americans were largely defined, who white America were, and he doesn't go so far back, he will include Italians or Irish and Jewish Americans.

He particularly is trying to undo Black studies, Black history. It comes out of the Trump feeling that the Black Lives Matter movement went so far in one direction that I'll take it far in another direction and try to do away with all of that. His battle with women that he always has that, after his first term, the largest march in American history was Women's March on Washington, DC, against Trump. He sees women and gender, women at the workplace as problematic. This is a president who's mired in Jeffrey Epstein problems right now.

He's screwing around with going and telling museums what they should be displaying and what they're not. Some of this is smoke and mirrors, some of it is to grab headlines, to deflect what is he really going to be able to do with these museums, cut some funding, make people feel some pain. I'll promise you this: Trump administration will be toast, and you will have Harvard University and Columbia University and University of Virginia.

He will be toast, and there will be a Smithsonian Institute explaining real history, because most Americans want things straight. They're tired. The distrust is in people trying to spread false narratives. That's why there was a demand for the Kennedy assassination papers released and Martin Luther King Jr, which President Trump has led on and I've approved of as a scholar, because that should be released now. People want some transparency. They want to know what happened. They want to know how the deal went down in American history. They love their country enough, go to any baseball game, go see the Orioles or the Nationals or the Yankees or the Mets, and pick your team. People stand for the national anthem.

There's a very rare person, the Kaepernick person, who won't, and they're allowed to not, and everybody's okay with it. We're a very patriotic country. We love our armed forces in the United States. There's still great pride in the flag. What we don't need is a president acting like a Russian or Chinese dictator, trying to tell people exactly what they must experience at a museum when the person telling them, President Trump, knows nothing about museum curating whatsoever.

Brian: Wow. By the way, before you go, I said in the intro that I was going to play a little clip from the piece of music that you won a Grammy for as I was getting ready for this segment today. You and I have talked many times. I know about your scholarly work, I know about your CNN work, a bunch of your books that you've been on to talk about, that you were Nancy Reagan's choice to edit President Ronald Reagan's Presidential diaries. What I only learned this morning in reading up on you a little bit more is that you won a Grammy for Best Jazz Ensemble for co-producing Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom. Everybody listen.

[music]

Brian: How'd you get involved with producing a jazz suite?

Professor Brinkley: I've actually won two Grammys. I won one for Presidential Suite, and I won another for a project called Fandango at the Wall. I love music in all kinds. I used to write for Rolling Stone, cover of Bob Dylan, and things like that. That one that you're talking about was with Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Ted Nash Big Band Orchestra at Lincoln Center, where we were looking at speeches, great oratory, whether it's Gandhi or Churchill. Working with Wynton Marsalis and Kabir Sehgal and others, we were able to take the snippet of an incredible speech and combine it with modern jazz music.

Brian: I apologize for not knowing about your other Grammys, especially because it was for Fandango at the Wall, which we've covered on this show with, I guess, your partner in that, the great piano player and band leader and composer Arturo O'Farrill, who's a friend of the show.

Professor Brinkley: Arturo is the best. We went down to Tijuana. I was there with him, and we did some recording down in Mexico. It was quite a project. I'm proud of both of them.

Brian: Maybe we'll get you two together on the show one day and talk about history and talk about jazz. All right. Historian Douglas Brinkley, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.

Professor Brinkley: I spent last night listening to Johnny Hodges, who used to play with Duke Ellington. Ellington still astonishes me about his greatness. If I had my way of changing history, I'd rechange Dulles Airport to Duke Ellington Airport.

Brian: [chuckles] Nice. Thanks again. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We turn the page and talk about the battle for and the battle over casinos in New York City and maybe Yonkers. Stay with us.

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