Smithsonian Pressure Eases After Trump Lunch, but Questions Remain
For more than a year, the Smithsonian Institution has been navigating sustained pressure from President Donald Trump and his administration over how American history is framed. Yet the most revealing moment in that standoff may have been a lunch last summer that, by all accounts, veered far from museum politics.
In a profile of Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, writer Clint Smith reports that the two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Trump was less a confrontation than a kind of charm offensive. According to unnamed White House and Smithsonian officials cited in the profile, the conversation over chicken and gravy moved from chandelier samples for the Oval Office to Trump’s interest in painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. It then drifted to Republican calls to move the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex to Houston.
From there, the discussion reportedly followed Trump’s familiar free-associative path: he criticized Washington Dulles International Airport, which sits near the annex, and even floated the idea of tearing it down and rebuilding it under his own name. Notably absent from the lunch, according to the profile, was any serious discussion of the Smithsonian’s interpretation of US history.
That omission matters. Bunch has described his exchange with Trump as having “no logic,” and in March he said publicly that nothing at the Smithsonian had been altered in response to outside pressure. “There is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian,” he said at an event with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The artifacts that are there are still there. The interpretations are still there.”
The institution’s strategy has been one of careful resistance. Smith reports that Bunch has largely complied with requests for internal documents while maintaining that exhibits and curatorial materials have not been changed. Internally, he has continued to assert the Smithsonian’s independence without naming Trump directly.
Still, the longer-term picture is less settled. Smith reports that Bunch’s family has urged him to retire, and many terms on the Smithsonian Board of Regents are set to expire this year. If Bunch departs, or if the board shifts in a more Trump-aligned direction, the institution’s ability to preserve its independence could face a far more serious test.
