On Thursday, President Donald Trump launched another broadside against the social justice movement that exploded after George Floyd’s death in 2020 and his own white nationalist response to it.

A new executive order titled “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History” directs Vice President J.D. Vance to “remove improper ideology” from the federally-funded Smithsonian collection of museums.

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In Trump’s latest order, he aspires to a whitewashed version of American history free from questions challenging the nation’s “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

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Anything else promotes “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Predictably, Trump lays blame for what he calls the Smithsonian’s ideological misalignment on the Biden administration. “The prior administration advanced this corrosive ideology,” the order states.

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” the order states.

The order goes on to cherry-pick language from recent Smithsonian exhibitions to create Trump’s own distorted narrative of a “woke” anti-American academic elite indoctrinating young minds. As an example, the order cites the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum – which hasn’t even opened yet – and says it “plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.”

Among Vance’s tasks in the order is safeguarding the sanctity of women by ensuring that appropriations for the Women’s History Museum “celebrate the achievements of women” and “do not recognize men as women in any respect.”  

In a section titled “Restoring Truth in American History,” Vance is charged with determining whether, since January 1, 2020, any public monuments, memorials, statues, or markers under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

Trump has already turned the clock back, forcing the dismantlement of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C.; restoring the names of military installations honoring slave-owning Confederate generals; and once again calling North America’s tallest peak Mt. McKinley instead of Denali.

He’s also purged another Washington institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, of Democrats, “wokeness” and LGBTQ+ programming, and installed loyalist out staffer Ric Grennel to run it while anointing himself “chairman of the board” and taking selfies from the red velvet-lined presidential box.

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