Congressman Raskin proposes Smithsonian exhibition on Trump's propaganda
Jamie Raskin, the Democratic congressman for Maryland, has introduced in the US House of Representatives a bill that would oblige the Smithsonian Institution to create a permanent exhibition on the propaganda of Donald Trump.
The bill is entitled the "Preserving and Remembering the History of Trump and Other Tyrants Act".
The document instructs the Smithsonian's leadership to collect and preserve objects connected with the president's self-glorification. Among them are the enormous banners bearing Trump's face, which have been hanging on federal buildings for some 21 months, as well as the plaques that the president intends to place outside Smithsonian museums warning of the "ideological capture" of the institution. In addition, the Institution is to gather photographs, videos and personal testimonies from citizens who stood up to authoritarianism.
The exhibition is to tell the story of the growth of state propaganda, corruption and authoritarianism under Trump's two presidential terms and to place them in the same line as earlier manifestations of political extremism in the United States. The bill names the movement of the "Know-Nothings" of the mid-nineteenth century, that is, the party that opposed immigrants and Catholics; the myth of the "Lost Cause" around 1900, which justified and romanticised the Southern Confederacy; and McCarthyism of the 1950s, that is, the campaign of persecution of people suspected of sympathy with communism. The bill even proposes a plaque of its own for the exhibition: it is to state that Trump ordered his plaques installed without the permission of Congress required by the Constitution, and that the 119th Congress approved this exhibition by law.
Raskin declared that the country must study the actions of a corrupt president so as not to repeat this slide into authoritarianism. In his words, society ought to learn by what means Trump tried to remake American history to suit his autocratic views.
The bill is in part a response to Executive Order 14416, "Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution", which Trump signed in July. In March 2025, soon after the start of his second term, Trump ordered a full review of the Institution. Later the White House began scrutinising the contents of eight Smithsonian museums and published a list of 20 exhibitions that it deemed unacceptable. In July 2026 the administration issued a 162-page report, "Saving America's History", which states that the National Museum of American History had suffered "institutional capture by radical activist ideology". The administration also proposed cutting the Institution's funding by 12% in 2026 and by 11% in 2027. In September the Secretary, that is, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, announced that he would step down at the end of the year
