The White House has ordered the Smithsonian Institution to align its museum exhibits with President Donald Trump's vision of American history, which has set off alarms about how that will impact the accuracy of the story told to visitors.
Eight museums are covered under the order setting a 120-day deadline for "replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions," and MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire said that would necessarily corrupt how they presented the history of slavery and other difficult topics.
"I mean, let's be blunt: This is really bad and really, really dangerous," the "Morning Joe" co-host said. "A nation needs to know its history. It has to be honest about its history to learn from it, to honor it, and also to then grow and improve for the present and future. This is there's no way that rewriting a history to fit one president's vision is good for a nation's health or good for a nation's democracy."
"We've already seen the Smithsonian change its impeachment exhibit, you know, because, you know, to eliminate the references to President Trump," he added. "They've been restored, modified, edited [and] sanitized some, but at least they're back. But now it seems like that's just the first step to a sweeping revisiting of American history through the Smithsonian. We already know a little bit about what this how this president views this issue and his administration."
The administration has ordered the return of Confederate monuments to parks in Washington, D.C., and slapped the names of Confederate generals back onto military bases, and Lemire said those efforts distorted the historical narrative.
"This is this is not what a healthy democracy does," Lemire said. "You know, you can be patriotic, you can love your country – we have the 250th anniversary next year. Certainly, President Trump and his team are already gearing up towards really celebrating that. Some of that is good, but to honor a nation's history you have to be honest about it and to sanitize it, to whitewash it, to not be honest about it, right, that's not good."