Sunday’s version of MS NOW’s The Weekend staged a kvetchathon over President Trump ordering the set up of indicators exterior the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past warning guests that the museum doesn’t precisely replicate American historical past.
The panel repeatedly requested: Who will get to inform America’s historical past?
They by no means answered that query, aside from to clarify they do not need Trump doing it.
The true reply is that on the Smithsonian, America’s historical past is advised by a cabal of leftist historians. Circumstances in level:
In 2020 the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition posted (and later eliminated after criticism) a graphic itemizing traits resembling individualism, the nuclear household, onerous work, punctuality, and politeness as “points and assumptions of whiteness.” On the time, the top of that Museum was Lonnie Bunch. He has since turn into total head of the whole Smithsonian.
Extra just lately, supplies related to the Nationwide Museum of American Historical past have framed “politeness” and “objectivity” as traits of “white supremacy tradition.” Rep. Brandon Gill [R-TX] confronted the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, with these paperwork in a July 2026 listening to. She unartfully tried to dodge his questions—however the information stay the information. Hartig herself has mentioned that she sees historical past as “a main software of social justice.”
Co-host Jackie Alemany cited “an excellent op-ed” within the New York Occasions going to the query of who will get to jot down American historical past. The column was written by Yale historian David W. Blight, a previous president of the Group of American Historians. Blight hilariously described the administration’s criticism as “nothing lower than a hyper-ideological group attacking a nonideological establishment.”
The Smithsonian: a nonideological establishment. Proper.
The OAH is the primary skilled group for U.S. historians. Affect Watch classifies it as left-of-center, and its public statements over time constantly align with leftist positions on race, identification, “inclusive historical past,” and opposition to efforts to curb DEI-oriented approaches in training and museums. It issued an announcement condemning the White Home’s July 4 “Saving America’s Story” report on the Smithsonian.
That is the skilled world that staffs and validates the museums.
The identical institutional world that produced the “politeness is white supremacy tradition” supplies, and the sooner NMAAHC “points of whiteness” graphic, is introduced because the impartial, non-ideological baseline.
The MS NOW panel introduced the leftist established order as merely “historical past” and any effort to alter it as harmful politicization. Attempt to not giggle on the idea of MS NOW urging much less politicization.
The document signifies the alternative: a long-running ideological seize by the left that the panel is now defending because the pure order of issues. Anybody who dares to problem their dominance is “politicizing.”
Here is the transcript.
MS NOW
The Weekend
7/26/26
7:23 am EDTEUGENE DANIELS: Eugene and Miles are sticking round. We’re gonna get into who will get to inform the story of America, who will get to belong, as a result of your president needs to place a warning signal in your museum, guys. Do not go anyplace. You are watching The Weekend.
. . .
EUGENE ROBINSON: Yeah, no, I feel that is crucial. I imply, , who will get to inform the story, is essential to what occurs sooner or later, proper? You need to, it’s important to know your previous as a way to know the place you are going. And so, the Trump administration clearly want to rewrite American historical past of their trend.
However I puzzled if this announcement about indicators exterior wasn’t in truth virtually an admission of defeat? He is been, he is been making an attempt to get inside, proper? He is been making an attempt to alter the reveals. He needs it to, he needs every little thing completely different.
DANIELS: And he is been taken off of that.
ROBINSON: And he has not completed that. He has not been ready to try this. And so, to place an indication exterior appears, frankly, kinda weak.
MILES TAYLOR: I imply, he would possibly as nicely have an indication that claims, “Please learn.” This, that is what autocrats do not perceive, and that they by no means perceive, these efforts to regulate and censor solely drive consideration to the factor you are making an attempt to distract from. It is a rare signal of weak point.
ROBINSON: Precisely. Pay no consideration to the person behind the scenes. That is proper.
. . .
JACKIE ALEMANY: [After conversation had digressed to Michigan Dem senatorial primary[ I, I’m, I’m sorry, I’m not sticking with the flow of the conversation because I, I was trying to, sort of, think a little bit more about the framing of your question, Eugene, about the Smithsonian.
But I do think we, we should spend a little bit more time talking about this because, Trump is trying to bend history to his will. There’s a great op-ed in, in the Times, this weekend about just that, Miles.
And I’m wondering how corrosive you think everything that he is doing in its totality is, is going to ultimately be, and whether that’s going to actually hold. I mean, his, we talk about it, you know, basically every weekend about the culture war that he’s simultaneously waging, in an explicit and an implicit way.
Explicitly, obviously, through his immigration policies, and then through, a little bit more of these more subtle ways, such as these signs that are going up at the Smithsonian, and constant attacks on Lonnie Bunch.
And actually this, this July fourth report, that actually makes several points that a lot of historians agree with, like the futility of land acknowledgments in the words of, of some mainstream historians.
MILES TAYLOR: You go back through history, and I think you see a pretty consistent theme is that would-be dictators, and Donald Trump, self-styles as a dictator. Trust me, I sat there in those meetings with the Oval Office, he talked about his, his envy of the Chinese and the Russians.
Would-be dictators and dictators do not get defeated, they defeat themselves. Most of the time, they defeat themselves. And what you’re seeing with Donald Trump from the little episodes like the Smithsonian to the efforts to rig elections is a remarkable sign of weakness, of self consciousness, of knowingness that he is defeating himself. And he somehow can’t get out of his way.
Now, that’s not super encouraging to anyone who’s watching the foundations of democracy corrode from this man. But in exercising his powers beyond their limitations, he is building his own opposition . . . You look at the arc of history, and you see he is laying the foundations for the demise of the movement he built.
ROBINSON: And one, one quick thing, the last column I wrote for the Washington Post was about a, a document that my late wife collected as part of her collection of African American historical documents.
It, it, and it recorded the sale of a black woman and her child, in Rhode Island in 1776. So you had these two things happening in 1776, you know, you had, you had slavery legal in all thirteen colonies in practice, and you had the Declaration of Independence.
This, this, this, this history happened, and there are receipts all over the place. There is, the, you know, the historians have done, a, a really good job over the last, thirty, forty years in, in telling that story much more fully, and, and, and, and it has penetrated, I think, the national consciousness.
So, so it’s hard to rewrite history when to that extent, it just, it can’t be done. We won’t, I won’t let it be done.
ALEMANY: I’m gonna,I’m gonna go back and reread that column. Thanks for flagging it.
