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Trump Wants To Make A Major Patriotic Shake-Up At Noted History Museum

Updated: VIEWS

Say what you will about President Donald Trump, but you cannot with any honesty say he doesn’t love America, as evidenced by his latest idea to spruce up some more America love.

Trump wants the National Museum of American History to build a five-year exhibit on George Washington, timed to the 300th anniversary of his birth in 2032. He wants it to start with an eleven-foot statue of Washington in the plaza, replacing the abstract “Infinity” sculpture currently occupying the spot. His assessment of that sculpture was blunt: it tells visitors nothing about America and honors none of our heroes.

He’s right, and the sculpture is the least of it. Consider what the Smithsonian did with the 250th anniversary of American independence — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, handed to the institution that exists to interpret this country to itself. It could have built a Center for American Heroes. Instead, under the previous administration, it built a Center for Restorative History, complete with a decolonization plan and a curatorial focus on the oppressed.

And then there’s the phrase. The Smithsonian’s own framing describes the period from 1492 to 1776 — the founding of European settlement through the Declaration — as the “Great Unsettling.” Sit with that. Not the founding. Not the settling. The unsettling. Nearly three centuries in which a continent was explored, colonized, cultivated, fought over, and finally organized into the first republic built on the proposition that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed — rendered as a disruption. A mess someone made.

This is what taxpayers are funding. Not a debate, not a hard look at slavery and dispossession alongside self-government and the rule of law, but a single mood applied to the whole national story: regret. And it’s being applied in the building where a school group from Missouri goes on its one trip to Washington.

The objection to all this isn’t that the Smithsonian teaches uncomfortable history. It should. Washington owned slaves, and any exhibit worth the marble will say so plainly. The objection is that an institution has quietly swapped its job — explaining how this country came to be — for a different job: adjudicating whether it should have. Those are not the same assignment, and only one of them was authorized by the people paying for it.

So: build the Washington exhibit. Five years is about right for the man who won the war of Independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, invented the American presidency, and then did the single most extraordinary thing any victorious general has ever done, which was hand the power back and go home to farm. Tell schoolchildren that story. It is the most important fact in the Western political tradition and half of them have never heard it.

One friendly note on the plan, though. The proposal also calls for a thirty-foot Washington on opening day, and that’s where a conservative ought to wince a little.

Washington spent his career refusing exactly this sort of thing. He turned down a crown. He resigned his commission when he could have kept it. He walked away after two terms and set a precedent that held for 150 years. The man was allergic to colossal self-glorification, and the way to honor him is not to build the kind of monument he’d have found embarrassing.

Give him the exhibit. Give him the scholarship, the artifacts, the letters, the schoolchildren filing past Mount Vernon’s surveying tools. Get the curation right and the statue can be any size you like. Just don’t call the founding an unsettling.