2025 was quite a year for the Smithsonian Institution, which found itself in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration early and often. Last year began with Trump calling for a purge of “anti-American ideology” from the institution’s 19 museums. 2026 appears to have brought more of the same.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration has redoubled its efforts to bring the Smithsonian to heel and has put forward a deadline of next Tuesday for it to comply with a comprehensive review of its content and plans. That is with an eye toward bringing it inline with Trump’s executive order issued last March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
While it seems that, at least on the surface, the Smithsonian’s strategy of late has been to delay, the Guardian‘s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins reported, also on Thursday, that internally many Smithsonian bureaucrats are already “acquiescing in advance”—self-censorship, in other words.
One Smithsonian staffer described to Higgins how a proposed label for an exhibition on the internment of Japanese Americans initially described the period as “unjust.” The Smithsonian, according to the staffer, requested for “unjust” to be removed for fear it might seem partisan.
“America hardly ever apologises for anything, and it almost never gives reparations, except for this event, this example in our history where we said sorry, and that apology came with money,” the staffer told Higgins. The staffer added that such small changes add up: “changing the language around this thing, not mentioning this thing—it is a question of small moral injuries.”
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology for the internment of Japanese Americans and offered $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. The law was passed after a decade-long effort by Japanese American activists.
The Smithsonian did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
