Battlefield of History Politics | Uncle Donald's Story Time

As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values ​​that define American history." With these words dripping with pathos, an open letter from the White House to the director of the Smithsonian Museums in the USA, Lonnie G. Bunch III, dated August 12, 2025, begins.

The Smithsonian State Museum complex is the largest in the world and deals with the natural and sociocultural history of the territory where the United States of America now stands. It is the definitive site of official US museum history—and thus, quite logically, in the sights of the current US government and its project of securing white-Christian, capitalist rule. Personally tasked with the ideological purge of the Smithsonian museums is US Vice President J.D. Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, flanked by the arch-conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who conveniently also serves as Chairman of the Smithsonian Board.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of Natural History, among others, have been explicitly asked to remove "divisive or partisan narratives" – meaning historical facts such as slavery and colonialism or the theory of evolution – from all exhibitions and programs within 75 days. But the American Women's History Museum, which is still in the planning stages, is also already in the firing line – initially on the transphobic grounds that it "celebrates male athletes."

Further examples of factors disrupting the image of "American exceptionalism" to which Trump and his associates want to commit the Smithsonian museums include the mention of the fact that the US "Founding Father" Benjamin Franklin owned enslaved people, the presentation of a film about the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and a document from the exhibition "¡Presente! Latino history" at the National Museum of American History, which depicts the US's military appropriation of Mexican territory (now parts of the US states of California, Arizona, and Texas) in 1848.

Historical-political rollback

As outrageously revisionist as it is of history, this agenda of the Trump administration is equally unoriginal. It simply does away with all those historical-political modernizations that US conservatives, organized for decades within the Republican Party, have always fiercely opposed—a battle, however, that was at least partially lost in the wake of "68" and its (movement-)political follow-up projects. The general thrust of Trumpist historical politics is likely to resonate well with the right as a whole. But the completely unbridled manner in which the now fascist Republican leadership is now bringing the narrative about the nation back onto the path of the white rulers resembles a conservative fever dream.

Incidentally, the US President had already issued the legal basis for his purge efforts in March 2025: a decree "To Restore Truth and Sanity to American Historiography." If one didn't know better, the title might seem laughable. But "the production, hypostatization, and circulation of these powerful, empty, capital-word signifiers," as fascism scholar Alberto Toscano describes fascist cultural production in his recent book "Late Fascism: Racism, Capitalism, and Authoritarian Crisis Politics," serves a deadly serious, already advanced project of domination that even seems to have reached its zenith.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Trumpists are operating in a nationalist world of ideas.

Trumpists are increasingly evidently operating within a nationalist worldview, which also defines the ideology of "degenerate art" under National Socialism: Critical—that is, realistic—representations of social conditions are not merely described as false or artistically devalued, but labeled as pathological, even "anti-people." Just as the Germans flocked to the Nazi exhibition in 1937—albeit partly for different reasons—US citizens are currently flocking "to museums to see certain exhibitions before they are dismantled" (Cronkite News). While some visitors have expressed their outrage over the planned changes to the press, overall, a fatalism seems to prevail. And even from the Smithsonian itself—as is currently evident in other democratic US institutions—there is no real resistance. Instead of attacking Trump's statements as the demagogic twists of phrase they are, the head of the Smithsonian fully embraces his approach in an internal memo to staff: "We continually review our content to ensure our programs are nonpartisan and factual."

In the case of the Smithsonian, we are dealing with museums that are less concerned with fine art than with historical themes. Nevertheless, something can be learned here about fascist aesthetics. As Walter Benjamin noted in 1937 in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," one of the essential characteristics of fascism is a strong tendency toward the aestheticization of politics: affective impulses replace a rational understanding of circumstances; objective and scientific content is grasped purely emotionally. Reason and affect are not dialectically mediated, as a work of art would be; rather, representation and reception are one-sided, reduced to kitsch and ornamentation. The consistent illustration of the "greatness of the nation" as an imperative for museum engagement with history is an example of this.

This aestheticization of politics is also clearly evident in the propaganda used by the Trump administration in its redesign of other state institutions. Two examples have made the media rounds in recent weeks: First, a recruitment call by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – "No age limit! Join ICE now!" – depicting a blond, Aryan-looking father-and-son pair with rifles in front of an American flag; second, the hanging of a gigantic Trump portrait on the U.S. Department of Labor building, with the slogan "American Workers First" underneath. (At this point, it is only worth pointing out the fascist character of using pseudo-class-struggle vocabulary while simultaneously launching a frontal attack on unions, labor law, and the welfare state, which the Trump administration is also currently waging.)

Control over culture

The Trump administration's considerable attention to culture, art, and national historiography is something it shares with the National Socialist rulers—and indeed, without wishing to equate them, with historical socialist states. The anything-goes approach of pluralistic democracy, in which the market exercises censorship and draws its strength precisely from allowing the most diverse expressions of opinion possible, is suspect to any authoritarian state—particularly because, in its rule based on open violence, it is in some respects more precariously positioned than democracy.

But to shatter the illusion that fascism and democracy are irreconcilable opposites, let us conclude by quoting Toscano once again: "As the writings of imprisoned Black revolutionaries in the United States show us, political systems that continue to be considered liberal and democratic can harbor institutions that, in a kind of racist duplication of the state, represent a regime of domination and terror for large segments of their population." What we are currently observing in the United States is therefore more the expansion of this regime to ever larger segments of the population than a complete break with the status quo. It remains to be hoped that this dismay will not further divide but rather create solidarity.