The Heritage Foundation, the massive MAGA think tank and political operation behind Project 2025, is egging on the Trump administration’s ongoing war against the Smithsonian Institution, which is part of the MAGA movement's broader efforts to control, censor, and whitewash efforts to teach the full truth about American history.
In its latest move against the Smithsonian, the White House on July 4 released a report called “Saving America’s Story,” which accuses the National Museum of American History of setting out to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
The country’s largest group of historians slammed the White House report, calling it an “example of executive branch overreach” and an attempt to “coerce Smithsonian leadership to shape its presentation of U.S. history so that it serves the administration’s political agenda—part of an ongoing and multi-pronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.” The group’s president called the report “a declaration of independence from history.”
In a July 6 press release, Heritage Senior Fellow Mike Gonzales called the White House report “a clarion call for the Board of Regents to fire the Institution’s Secretary Lonnie Bunch III and the entire leadership.”
“The timely report makes clear why we have Marxist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Pramila Jayapal, and Katie Wilson,” said Gonzales. “They and their voters have been taught by institutions such as the Smithsonian to despise America’s history and heritage.”
Gonzales had also called for the firing of the Institution’s “woke leadership” back in April.
Bunch is a historian who oversaw the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture before taking the Smithsonian’s top job in 2019. He has said the White House report is “not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History.”
In a recent episode of the “Heritage Explains” podcast, Gonzales explained his work as fighting “the dark Marxist forces that want to take over society.” He said America’s cultural institutions are run by “a very committed left that does not want to reform America, they want to dismantle America and replace it with something else.”
Gonzales called the report on the American History Museum “an indictment of the whole [Smithsonian] complex” and said that the Latino Museum under development should not be built because it would be “an even worse incubator, hothouse, for grievances against the United States and against Western civilization.”
“Only a foolish people pay with their tax money for institutions that lead to their cultural erasure,” Gonzales said. “Americans are not a foolish people—on the contrary. They need to understand what is taking place, and once they do, this will end very quickly.”
A Quinnipiac poll last year found that 60 percent of voters opposed the administration’s efforts to force Smithsonian museums to comply with Trump’s directives.
