More than a year after President Donald Trump announced his intention to rewrite history at the Smithsonian, the administration has issued a lengthy, 160-page report, with more than 500 footnotes, on its flagship museum. Drafted by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, the document tries to demonstrate how “ideological capture” at the National Museum of American History “Erases Our Heritage.” And at every turn, it proves the opposite, while scrubbing American history of everything that doesn’t fit officials’ feel-good narrative of a country only incidentally marred by imperfections, all of which are safely in our past.
