U.S. parks and museums are becoming the latest battleground in the nation’s culture wars as President Trump seeks changes to the way national parks and the Smithsonian tell the story of America.
The Trump administration has targeted exhibitions and programs that touch on everything from slavery and the Civil Rights Movement to transgender rights and disabilities issues.
Trump last week in a social media post said that museums in particular were “woke.”
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
Those supporting Trump’s actions say they will restore national pride, but critics in the arts and parks, as well as a number of Democrats, argue they whitewash history and do not tell people the full story.
“When you start erasing or sanitizing our history so that it is not offensive, so that all the bad bits are taken out to make people feel comfortable, we lose the ability to think critically,” said Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources and government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
The White House last week announced a list of 20 Smithsonian exhibits and displays it found objectionable, including the flying of a pride flag at multiple Smithsonian campuses, content featuring “animated Latinos and Latinas with disabilities” at the National Museum of the American Latino and a commissioned stop-motion animation of the career of infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci that was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.
The White House previously announced a review to ensure “alignment” at the Smithsonian museums with Trump’s “directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
The Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution made up of 21 museums and other facilities. It was established by Congress in 1846 as a public-private partnership. It receives about 62 percent of its funding from the federal government, including funding through bipartisan congressional appropriations bills.
A Congressional Research Service report last updated in 2006 says that federal funding for the institution has grown “exponentially” over the years and that while it has private trust funds, legally it tends to be classified as a primarily federal entity.
Similar efforts are taking place at the National Park Service, a government agency, following a March executive order directing the Interior Department to ensure that public monuments, memorials, statues and markers “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans.”
A June memo from the administration directed National Park Service units — which include 433 parks, monuments, battlefields, parkways, historic sites and more — to review all public-facing content for messaging that disparages Americans or that “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of natural features.
The memo was obtained by the National Parks Conservation Association and shared with The Hill. The organization also obtained responses from sites with flagged content from national park sites.
Among the information flagged by staff was information related to the mistreatment of Native Americans, information related to slavery and information about climate change and other environmental problems.
For example, at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, the site of the Liberty Bell and signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, an exhibit that focused “heavily” on slavery was flagged.
A staffer noted that this exhibit, which opened in 2010, was designed as a memorial to nine enslaved people and said that it contained panels that may be inappropriately disparaging to historical figures including George Washington.
At the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida, text was flagged that describes the imprisonment of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche and Caddo tribes. The submission specifically says language “referring to tribes having the choice between extinction or assimilation” should be reviewed.
The fort was built by the Spanish in the 1600s to defend Florida. A group of Native Americans from the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma were taken to Florida and imprisoned at the fort in the 1800s.
A submission related to the Selma to Montgomery National Historic trail, the route of the 1965 march for Black Americans’ suffrage, stated that “while the statements in the scripts are historically accurate … the information may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are less familiar with the history of the Civil Rights movement.”
A submission from the Everglades National Park in Florida said several of the park’s “stories could be conceived as being disparaging to the development of industrial America.” It cites the impacts of “urbanization, agriculture, drainage and industrialization” on the establishment of the park to protect water and other natural resources.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, described the administration’s effort as restoring “proportionality” to the way history is told.
“No liberal democracy can exist by constantly denigrating itself. No confident democracy can be a democracy or confident if all you do is self-flagellate,” said Gonzalez, who is also a former George W. Bush administration official.
But Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, said that the administration is “attempting to tell a very incomplete history of the American past.”
Spears said the shift could change the way Americans learn about their history in a negative way.
“In 2024 there were 330 million visits to our national parks,” Spears said. “That’s 330 million opportunities for individuals to learn something new, that maybe slavery was a root cause of the American Civil War, to learn about the fight that it took the suffragists to win the right for women to vote in this country, to learn a little bit about the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles for voting rights in this country and equal representation.”
“But if they never have that experience, if they never had that opportunity to learn, it doesn’t get planted at all,” he said.
Parks have posted signs with QR codes encouraging feedback from members of the public.
The National Parks Conservation Association shared some of this information with The Hill, which included a variety of responses from the public, some of which pushed back on the administration. Many submissions called for more information about Native American history and restoring information about transgender people at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City.
Spokespeople for the National Park Service did not say whether any particular language flagged by staff or the general public would be changed.
Instead, a press email confirmed that the agency received “several substantive comments from across the country complimenting park programs or services, noting maintenance issues, or flagging potential inaccuracies or distortions of information out of context.”
“We have nothing further to provide on the specifics of this feedback,” the agency said.
The park service, in response to questions from The Hill, said “interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures — without acknowledging broader context or national progress — can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it.”
“This effort is not about rewriting our past. Our goal is to foster honest, respectful storytelling that educates visitors while honoring the complexity of our nation’s shared journey,” the park service concluded, in a statement that came from a press email inbox that did not contain an individual spokesperson’s name.
Some critics of the changes in the national parks are former employees.
“The American people have every right to expect that when you have a tour or you see a sign, that it’s based on quality history and it’s telling as close to what we understand things to be as you can, and sanitizing it and making it superficial denies the American people an opportunity for us to understand what we’ve come through and where we’ve succeeded,” said Heather Huyck, a public historian who worked at the park service for many years.
Others also argue the shift in museums and parks could be echoed in other parts of American life.
“A worst-case scenario is that we’re going to see a progressively more aggressive push to control this national narrative, to control the collective memory … and, sort of swerving into the space of authoritarian control of information,” said Beth English, executive director of the Organization of American Historians.
The administration issued an executive order in January that seeks to bar federal funding from schools that teach “critical race theory” or “radical gender ideology.” A judge blocked the administration’s attempts to get schools to certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion practices and an order that threatened funding for universities for similar reasons.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services threatened to strip federal grant funding from states if their sex education curricula contain information about transgender people.
Gonzalez, with the Heritage Foundation, praised the administration’s efforts to curb diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities in particular.
“That front of the culture war has well begun and is well on its way,” he said.
Critics of the administration’s approach argued that talking about the less flattering parts of American history is patriotic.
“It is patriotic to acknowledge America’s faults, to acknowledge that the story of America is a country continually improving itself. The only way you can do that is by acknowledging your faults, by acknowledging we have failed in the past as a nation, and we have improved and gotten ourselves better as a country. To do the opposite … that’s the kind of stuff you see in North Korea,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities.
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