Framing Whose America?

Smithsonian Review, Political Power, and the Battle for America’s Story

A symbolic act of erasure. A suited hand paints over part of the American flag with thick white paint, evoking the deliberate covering or rewriting of history. The textured yarn of the flag beneath suggests the depth and complexity of the nation’s story, now at risk of being obscured for the sake of a more controlled narrative.

In early 2025, I penned an essay titled “Restoring Whose Truth? Trump’s Executive Order and the Fight Over American Memory.” That piece wrestled with what it meant for a government to claim it was “restoring truth” to history.

Now, just a few months later, I find myself revisiting those concerns in light of a new development: the White House’s August 12, 2025, letter to the Smithsonian Institution. Reading that letter, I felt an unsettling mix of déjà vu and alarm.

The same themes I warned about, politicized “truth,” top-down narrative control, and the quiet erasure of dissent, have resurfaced, now in the form of a formal directive to our nation’s museums.

My earlier essay dissected President Trump’s March 27 executive order, bluntly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” That order framed the issue as if America’s historical narrative had been hijacked by “ideologically driven distortions” and needed rescuing.

It presupposed that there is a single correct version of our past that must be reinstated, implying that interpretations foregrounding injustice or racism are not only wrong but “illegitimate and perhaps even irrational.”