This week’s Joseph Welch Award

Friends,

This week’s Joseph Welch Award — which goes to a person who stands up to tyranny in America, just as attorney Joseph Welch stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s — goes to Lonnie Griffith Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian said today it would restore information about Trump’s two impeachments to an exhibit about impeachment in the National Museum of American History, a division of the Smithsonian.

Here’s the background: In March, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “divisive narratives” and “anti-American ideology” across the Smithsonian museums and “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

In May, Trump announced that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet. The gallery is another division of the Smithsonian. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI,” Trump asserted, “which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”

It’s unclear if Trump had authority to fire Sajet. The Smithsonian’s programming is not under the purview of the executive branch, and personnel decisions for senior-level Smithsonian museum positions are made by Bunch, not the White House. But when has lack of legal authority stopped Trump?

In July, the National Museum of American History removed a placard from a display of presidential impeachments. The placard included Trump’s two impeachments. The placard that replaced it stated that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal”: Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Bill Clinton.

The former placard including Trump’s two impeachments had been on display since September 2021.

A person familiar with what occurred told The Washington Post that the former placard had been removed following pressure from the White House and the firing of Sajet.

But today the Smithsonian held firm. It said in a statement today, “The section in question, Impeachment, will be updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

It’s obvious that Lonnie Bunch is standing up to Trump, trying to protect the integrity of the Smithsonian even as Trump tries to destroy it — as Trump has destroyed the integrity of so many other institutions (such as, just this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

In his second term, Trump is trying to exert influence over all American cultural institutions.

Trump has forced the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to terminate arts and humanities grants that fall “outside of the priorities set by the president,” telling grant recipients that “funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.”

Now that he’s made himself chairman of the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, House Republicans — presumably at Trump’s urging — have proposed renaming the center for Trump and its opera house for Melania Trump. (The measure, sponsored by GOP Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, is now part of legislation to fund the Interior Department but would still need to pass through the full House and the Senate to become law.)

And so on.

Make no mistake. All this comes directly out of the authoritarian-fascist playbook: Control the arts. Rewrite history. Force the culture to celebrate its strongman as a heroic figure.

Art and history are vehicles for telling the truth. Museums are our means of conveying truth across generations. We must never sacrifice the truth to an authoritarian-fascist who demands it be altered to suit his malignant narcissism.