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In 2006, Stephen Colbert—brutally in-character, and standing about six feet from the U.S. President he was openly mocking—remarked that reality should sometimes be disregarded on account of its “well-known liberal bias.” The same thought may, presumably, also be applied to history, when a sober recitation of things that actually happened, and which everybody quite clearly remembers, gets in the way of prevailing political winds. For instance: The Washington Post reports today that a display at the Smithsonian Institute, focused on the extremely rare practice of presidential impeachment, has now been altered to make it seem just a little bit rarer. You’ll never guess which of America’s three impeached presidents has been removed!
WaPo reports that, earlier in July, the Smithsonian’s National Museum Of American History altered a display in its The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibit, in order to remove references to the two times Donald Trump has been impeached by Congress. Trump’s two impeachments (in 2019 and 2021) were added to the display via a temporary label, titled “Case under redesign (history happens)” back in 2021. The label has now been removed from the display, which now reverts to previous language that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” (For what it’s worth, the online companion for the exhibit briefly mentions Trump’s impeachments, and updates the number of imperiled presidents to four, also including Clinton, Johnson, and the nearly-impeached Nixon.)
According to unnamed sources, the reversion of the display came after the White House put pressure on the Smithsonian to undergo review for “anti-American ideology,” one of those phrases that feels like a warm little slice of dystopia sliding into the brain every time we read it. A Smithsonian spokesperson said the exhibit was reverted to its 2008 state because none of the other exhibits in the “Limits Of Presidential Power” section it’s part of had been updated since then. (After all, why should the specific display on impeachment change, just because the total number of impeached or near-impeached presidents had increased by fully 33 percent since it was first created?) The decision comes as the Smithsonian comes under increased scrutiny from a President who’s spent the last seven months fumbling and groping for the bra hooks of American cultural control; the Institute’s National Portrait Gallery director, Kim Sajet, recently resigned her position after Trump repeatedly called for her firing, and painter Amy Sherald pulled a planned exhibit from the Portrait Gallery over reports that the Institute was considering removing her painting of a trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty.
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