Murray State University’s Dr. Brian Clardy has added his voice to the chorus of historians, opinion writers and others who are denouncing President Donald Trump’s broad-based attack on “woke” museums, including the Smithsonian Institution.
In a social media post, Trump faulted the Smithsonian for concentrating “on how bad slavery was” while short-shrifting America’s “Success” and “Brightness.”
In August, “the Trump White House called for a review of all current and future exhibitions at eight of the Smithsonian’s museums, including several of its major art museums, to assess their ‘alignment with American ideals.’” Zachary Small wrote in The New York Times.
“‘The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” President Trump wrote online, before the White House released its own list of museum programming it considered objectionable.” Small reported.
“The president is acting like a three-year-old child who needs to be put in time out,” said Clardy, a professor of history. “But Congress doesn’t care, the courts are looking the other way, and this petulant child is doing whatever the hell he wants.”
Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce didn’t pull punches either, writing, “the president once again tried to put his banana pants on over his head. This time, his topic was the nation’s museums and his plans to shake them down the way he did the country’s elite colleges and universities if they don’t stop being ‘WOKE.’ This, of course, is a concept he doesn’t remotely understand — among many, many others — except as a kind of primer cord to set off the primal fear in Meemaw and the others he has invited into the third-rate haunted-house exhibit of his mind.”
Clardy suggested that Trump read the Constitution’s Article II, Section 2, which spells out a president’s powers. “Micromanaging museums isn’t among them,” he said. “It is not his job to determine what we should be seeing and studying in a museum. But Donald Trump is a racist. Period. Full stop. Through his words and policies, he has cultivated the same following of a George Wallace, an Orval Faubus, a Theo Bilbo, and all the way back to ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman. He appeals to those same constituencies and their hatreds.”
Vanderbilt University historian and author John Meacham was kinder, gentler in his criticism of Trump for going after museums. Appearing on MSNBC, he conceded that historians and institutions aren’t perfect and that there isn’t “a perfect presentation of American history. ... History is an art more than it is a science. That said, to defer to a party in power or the person in power in a given moment for ‘the’ interpretation of the American story is inherently dangerous because it means that whomever is strongest in a given moment controls the narrative and the point of reason, the point of a life of the mind, is to see things whole and beyond a particular election result.”
A president “should know the centrality of slavery to the history of the United States,” Clardy said. “The initial wealth of the United States was based on slavery. Slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and in 2025 we are still dealing with the long-term results of slavery.”
Claiming that slavery wasn’t so bad is nothing new, according to Clardy. Early 19th century apologists of the region’s “peculiar institution” claimed slavery benefited the enslaver and the enslaved. In his critically acclaimed book, Apostles of Disunion: Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (University Press of Virginia, 2001), historian Charles B. Dew quoted Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who praised human bondage as an institution by which “a superior race” had transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers.”
After the war, groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked in tandem to create a “Lost Cause” narrative “based on the belief in white supremacy and...expressed through Confederate symbolism,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This narrative is a tool to impose continued structural discrimination through policies and practices impacting the everyday lives of Black people.”
Clardy said Trump’s most ardent supporters — nearly all of them white — love him “because he hates the people that they hate. But he is 79 and I’m more concerned about what comes after him. If Trump decided to leave today, the problem of racism would still be here.”
Pierce wrote that he is most worried about “the hundreds of small museums dealing with all those parts of American history that make the president feel icky —the Nicodemus National Historical Site out in Kansas or the Lest We Forget Museum in Pennsylvania or the beautiful little museum at Wounded Knee. These places don’t have anywhere near the wherewithal to resist if and when the Eye of Sauron falls upon them. And what of Bryan Stevenson’s extraordinary Legacy Museum in Alabama, which describes itself this way:
“Travel through a comprehensive history of the destructive violence that shaped our nation, from the slave trade, to the era of Jim Crow and racial terror lynchings, to our current mass incarceration crisis – and find inspiration in our soaring Reflection Space and world-class art gallery.”
Warned Pierce: “If there’s anything guaranteed to draw the attention of the fourth-rate ambulance chasers from White House legal stables, it’s something that talks about ‘racial terror lynchings’ without mentioning how important they were as community gatherings in small-town America.”
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