Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to President Donald Trump, in an interview with Newsmax on Thursday, denied accusations that the White House’s review of U.S. museums is an attempt at “whitewashing” the nation’s history.
Trump said on social media this week that “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
His remarks came about one week after several White House advisers, including Halligan, sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution announcing “a review of exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.”
Halligan told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America” that the White House is looking to find “where the Smithsonian went wrong” and said “it’s not about whitewashing” history as some scholars contend.
“The Smithsonian Institution is really a microcosm of the education system as a whole, and unfortunately, our education system in America has been all indoctrination,” she said.
“Museums that are over 70% funded by the federal government shouldn’t be laboratory for political laboratories for political experiments,” Halligan added.
Halligan said that she and her colleagues “just sent a letter to the Smithsonian asking for all information regarding their exhibits and their placards to try to get to the bottom of what happened and where the Smithsonian went wrong, and try to make the Smithsonian amazing and great, and live up to what the president wants the Smithsonian and [Washington] D.C. to be. It’s the capital of our city, and we need to make it amazing and great and beautiful.”
She later said that the review is “not about whitewashing. It’s all about full context. So while while slavery is obviously a horrible aspect of our nation’s history, you can’t really talk about slavery honestly unless you also talk about hope and progress.”
Halligan continued, “And I think we need to be focusing on the progress that we’ve made since then. And we need to stop focusing so much on on the lack of progress.”
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