White House suddenly remembers it has problems with the Smithsonian

The complaints in the report are about what you would expect. The administration claims that in the museum, “the Founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded; traditional patriotic narratives are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt; and the basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, ‘problematized,’ and reinterpreted to achieve ideological ends.” The report mentions multiple times that figures like Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin are criticized for their history as slaveholders “while their decisive roles in building the Republic and their anti-slavery efforts are minimized or ignored.” 

Needless to say, the complaints in this memo are also ideologically driven. (Good luck finding an objective, ideologically-free telling of any historical topic anywhere in the world.) But the complaints are not relegated to history of the more distant past. “[T]hey view America as systemically racist today,” reads the report later (emphasis its own). The report takes particular issue with this because since 1957, when the Smithsonian was founded, the country passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act (which this administration has effectively gutted), and “elected a Black president twice” (a president that the current president baselessly insisted was not born in the United States). Of course, the report is focused on far more than glossing over the racist history of the U.S.; if you have the stomach for it, you can read it for yourself here.