Mickey Mouse represents 'blackface': Trump fully exposes the rot at the Smithsonian's American history museum

Fed up with the federal government denigrating American exceptionalism, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on March 27, 2025, titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."

"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," Trump wrote.

'The Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted.'

Trump said his administration would, as a matter of policy, "restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."

Any curative initiative worth its salt depends upon a robust understanding of the illness at hand and its symptoms. To this end, the White House's Domestic Policy Council has diagnosed in a lengthy report released on Independence Day the disease afflicting the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and its various manifestations.

At the outset, the report notes that the NMAH should tell the American people — in an honest, proud, and serious manner — where their nation came from, what makes it distinctive, and why it is worth preserving.

Instead, ideologues behind the scenes at the NMAH have in recent years alternatively told revisionist histories in a contemptuous manner and pushed agitprop in an apparent effort to simultaneously advance leftist agendas and to disenchant and disorient visitors.

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The NMAH's ideological capture goes to the top.

The report highlights the radicalism of Anthea Hartig, the current NMAH director, who apparently:

• Regards history as a "prime tool of social justice";
• Figures that one of her roles is to connect "research and scholarship to activism and advocacy";
• Seeks to "get out of the 'America First' mentality" when telling history;
• Wanted to "problematize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026"; and
• Wanted to shift attention in the museum away from an "Anglo-centric" focus on the American founding.

Beyond raising concern about Hartig's apparent radicalism, the report presents a mountain of evidence showing that the NMAH "purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression."

"In the Museum's current telling," the report continues, "the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice."

The report states, for instance, that the museum:

• Failed to hold any special Independence Day events celebrating America's 250th anniversary on July 4;
• No longer holds patriotic Star-Spangled Banner flag-folding ceremonies or any other special programming to celebrate Flag Day;
• Characterized Christopher Columbus as a "murderer," "slaver," "killer," and "thief";
• "Slander[s]" America's founders;
• Has "consistently denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians, and Americans in educational materials and programming, failing to highlight how Christians and Christian principles also have contributed to America's Founding and flourishing";
• Teaches visitors that "[ukuleles] are ... a product of U.S. imperialism," Mickey Mouse represents "vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy," and "Wild West shows turned the subjugation of Indigenous people into theater";
• Devoted 20% of the "Electric Dr. Franklin" exhibit to "Enslaved People," including baseless speculation about whether his electrical experimentation involved "an indentured servant or an enslaved person";
• Endeavors to link every exhibit to race and identity, gender and sexuality, environmental change, immigration and migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and/or nationalism and globalism;
• Pushes gender ideology in numerous exhibits, one of which features a trans-identifying woman's chest binder;
• Targets kids with gender propaganda and claims in its glossary that "a child may feel they are a girl some days and a boy on others, or possibly feel that neither term describes them accurately"; and
• Held a recurring meeting for staff members to discuss and read a radical tool kit that identified perfectionism, a sense of urgency, the prioritization of quantity over quality, paternalism, "worship of the written word," either/or thinking, individualism, and objectivity as "characteristics of white culture which show up in our organizations."

The Domestic Policy Council concluded that "the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America's story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic."

The museum did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

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