Trump influence? US museum receives backlash for removing Potus's impeachment display

The parent organisation of a top-visited history museum in the United States denied that political pressure played a role in the removal of a display about the impeachment of US President Donald Trump, during his first term in office.

The Smithsonian Institution, which runs the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, said on Sunday that it removed the “temporary” placard for failing to meet the museum’s standards in “appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation”. “It was not consistent with other sections in the exhibit and blocked the view of the objects inside its case. For these reasons, we removed the placard,” the institution said in a statement.

“We were not asked by any Administration or other government officials to remove content from the exhibit," the statement further reads. The American institution runs around 21 museums and the National Zoo. In the statement, the Smithsonian Institution made it clear that the museum would be updating the impeachment section in the coming weeks to “reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history”.

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What led to the clarification?

The statment came after The Washington Post on Thursday reported that the museum removed an explicit reference to Trump’s impeachment last month. This resulted in the exhibit about impeachment incorrectly reading that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal”.

The Post cited an unnamed source familiar with the exhibit plans and reported that the display was taken down following a “content review that the Smithsonian agreed to undertake following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director”.

The museum’s decision to remove the display swiftly drew backlash, with critics of Trump calling the development the latest capitulation to the whims of an authoritarian president. “You can run, but you cannot hide from the judgment of history,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday.

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“So, here’s my message to the president: no matter what exhibits you try to distort, the American people will never forget that you were impeached – not once, but twice," he added. Since the start of his second term, Trump has been seeking greater control over political, cultural and media institutions as part of his transformative “Make America Great Again” agenda.

In March this year, the US President signed an executive order to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s properties and deny funding for exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race”. It is pertinent to note that during his first term in the White House, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives twice, in 2019 and 2021.

However, he was eventually acquitted by the US Senate on both occasions. Trump was the third US president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and the only US president to be impeached twice. Interestingly, former US President Richard Nixon faced a near-certain impeachment before his resignation in 1974 following the Watergate Scandal.