When President Trump summoned Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for lunch at the White House on August 28 of last year, Bunch’s advisers assumed that the end was near. Trump had spent months threatening the Smithsonian’s independence; just nine days earlier, he’d written on Truth Social 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.”It stood to be a tough visit, and not only because Bunch, the first Black leader of the Smithsonian, takes the widely held position that slavery was, in fact, “bad.” Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and, as such, is one of the country’s leading and most visible advocates for the commemoration and celebration of Black history. From the start of the second Trump administration, the entire Smithsonian had been a target of those on the MAGA right who are preoccupied with expunging what they understand to be “wokeness” from prominent institutions. In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order demanding the restoration of “truth and sanity” to American history and directing Vice President Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to reverse the spread of “divisive ideology” in the museum system. Then, in May 2025, Trump attempted to fire the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, igniting a two-week standoff. It did not seem to matter to him that the Smithsonian, though partially funded by the federal government, is meant to be independent.Bunch’s staff assumed that he would come under sustained attack from the president. He was already contending with regents who wanted to fire him for the Smithsonian’s putative leftism. At one meeting, Representative Carlos Giménez, a Republican from Miami who holds one of the three seats on the board reserved for members of the House, accused Bunch of sympathizing with Fidel Castro and demanded his resignation, a call that resulted in a rare rebuke from the chancellor of the board, Chief Justice John Roberts.It is Bunch’s long-standing position that the Smithsonian, which was founded in 1846, should not leave a visitor with negative feelings about the United States. The collection of museums largely represents a celebration of American ingenuity, art, and innovation. Bunch believes that the Smithsonian’s presentation of history should be comprehensive and complicated, as well as optimistic. His position would not have been considered particularly controversial before the rise of Trump; nor would Bunch have been considered anything but a mainstream historian. Like many historians, he argues that learning about negative aspects of American history does not undermine people’s ability to understand the good the country has done. “Every day, I have somebody talk to me about how important it is to have complexity and nuance,” he said at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April. “How they really understood something after they’ve gone through a Smithsonian exhibition that they had no idea of.” Bringing that complexity to life, he believes, is the mission of the institution, and he was ready to argue that point with Trump over a chicken-and-gravy lunch.But the anticipated showdown never came. Over the course of two and a half hours, Bunch was subjected to a charm offensive. The president treated Bunch warmly; much of their conversation had to do with White House decor. At one point, Trump showed Bunch four chandelier samples for the Oval Office; one was clear, the others white, silver, and gold. Trump asked which one he preferred. Bunch, who wasn’t born yesterday, chose gold. Trump turned to an aide and said, “See? He agrees with me!” Trump then asked Bunch to name the most important building in Washington. Trump’s own answer was the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the White House’s next-door office complex. Bunch mentioned that the building is famously ugly, at which point Trump called in aides to show Bunch renderings of the structure, repainted white. (The account of this lunch is based on conversations with White House and Smithsonian officials as well as people in close contact with Smithsonian leadership.)Bunch knew beforehand that one specific issue would be raised, either by Trump or his aides: the location of the space shuttle Discovery, which Texas’s Republican senators want to move from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles International Airport to Houston. Senator John Cornyn had been lobbying for years to have the shuttle moved to Houston and, according to people familiar with his efforts, had more recently begun making the case to the White House that, among other things, the Smithsonian is too “woke” to display the retired space vehicle. But Bunch came prepared with a nonpolitical rebuttal: Millions of tourists have visited the Discovery at the Smithsonian facility, and only a fraction of that number would see it in Houston. At which point Trump became seized by the subject of Dulles’s appearance. Trump has criticized the modernist airport for being ugly and outdated. He told Bunch that Dulles should be “knocked down,” built again, and named after him. After a 10-minute digression about the airport’s shortcomings, Trump took Bunch on a tour of the Cabinet Room. He didn’t mention the space shuttle again. Nor did he mention the Smithsonian’s understanding of American history.When the meeting was over, Bunch was relieved but flummoxed. The episode, he explained to an audience at UCLA in November, was “the most stressful lunch I’ve ever had in my life.”Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Win McNamee / Getty; Amy Sparwasser / Getty.“I kept waiting for the sword of Damocles to come take my head off,” Bunch recounted. “There was no logic to the conversation.”Since that lunch, the 73-year-old Bunch has continued to defend the Smithsonian, but he appears to be inching closer to leaving. His family, fearful of what continued public antagonism means for his well-being, wants him to retire. He has begun to talk more openly about the strain that Trump’s interest has put on the Smithsonian. “For the Smithsonian, this is probably the most difficult time since the Civil War,” he said at the gathering of historians.The conflict has largely disappeared from the news in recent months—a partial reflection, perhaps, of Bunch’s diplomatic finesse, as well as the general global and domestic chaos that is a feature of the Trump era. But as America approaches its 250th birthday, the Smithsonian is readying itself for the tensions over how it tells the story of the nation to resume, and potentially reach a climax.A conviction in the necessity of curatorial independence has motivated Bunch throughout what has surely been among the most contentious periods a Smithsonian secretary has ever faced. “I tell people all the time, ‘I’m a nice guy, but poke me in the eye and I’ll fight you forever,’” he said at a public event in March. “So the key here is not to fight just to fight. The key is to make sure you’re just trying to protect an institution, to do the work we need to do.”Al Drago / The Washington Post / GettyHe’s gotten the Smithsonian this far. What is uncertain is whether the institution is built to withstand an assault from a chief executive with designs on shaping history—or whether it needs a charismatic executive of its own to survive.Bunch grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in Belleville, New Jersey, where he and his family were the only Black people. The biographies he was assigned in middle school looked like the town. So Bunch found histories of Black life in his grandfather’s old trunk, which ultimately led him to Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois.After earning his Ph.D. in history and stints as a curator and professor, Bunch became a curator at the Smithsonian’s American-history museum in 1989. While assembling an exhibition on 19th-century America with a focus on the legacy of slavery, he traveled to plantations throughout the South, attempting to find one site that he might highlight as representative of the larger institution. He traversed Louisiana and Alabama and North Carolina, walking across land where exploited Black hands had harvested the sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco that would help build America’s wealth. Ultimately, he found himself at a rice plantation established in the 1730s at the edge of the Sampit River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.There, Bunch encountered Princy Jenkins, a 90-something Black man who had been the plantation’s caretaker and had once lived in one of its slave cabins with his formerly enslaved grandmother. Jenkins told Bunch bluntly: “If you are a historian, then your job better be to help people remember not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember.” The directive stayed with him. Bunch committed himself to ensuring that in his historical and curatorial work, he would not compromise on the truth, no matter how difficult it was to face.In 2001, Bunch left Washington to become the president of the Chicago Historical Society (today the Chicago History Museum), a move that he understood made a return to the Smithsonian unlikely. Two years after Bunch moved, however, Congress finally passed legislation that advocates had been pushing for over nearly 100 years: It would create a national African American museum. The relentless efforts of Representative John Lewis had finally made the idea a reality. In December 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act. Now someone needed to create it.Bunch by then had become one of the most well-regarded historians and museum curators in the country. He was an obvious choice. When asked if he would be interested, he was flattered, but uncertain. There was “no staff, no site, no architect, no building, no collections, and no money,” he wrote in his memoir. It would take at least 10 years to open the museum’s doors. “It carried the weight and the burden of history,” he wrote.But it was also an unprecedented chance to tell the story of his people, and in doing so, to tell the story of America. He didn’t want to see someone else potentially squander the opportunity. It might take years off his life, he thought. But if he did it right, it would be worthwhile.As Bunch turned his attention to the new endeavor, he had to navigate tensions within the Black community about how to tell the story of Black American life. Some scholars and activists told him that the museum needed to “out-Holocaust” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by focusing largely on “what they did to us.” But Bunch also heard from people who said that the new museum should focus on a more hopeful and inspiring message. He often recounts the story of meeting an elderly Black woman who thanked him for his work, hugged him, and whispered into his ear, “Whatever you do, don’t discuss slavery.”Bunch took both viewpoints seriously, but he came to believe that slavery or no slavery was a false choice. He understood that slavery was painful for many Black Americans to confront. These were people’s ancestors: their great-grandparents, their grandparents, even their parents. (Ruth Bonner, the woman who would ring the bell to signal the opening of the museum, was the daughter of a man who had been born into slavery.) And yet he knew that the museum had a responsibility to present and contextualize the full history. “As a country, we cannot fully understand ourselves without embracing the nation’s interdependency with slavery,” Bunch wrote.The museum would capture the reality of the violence, subjugation, and exploitation Black Americans experienced while also making clear that they were and are not singularly defined by that experience. “I wanted to build a museum,” Bunch has said, “where you’d cry as you pondered the pain of slavery or segregation—but I also wanted you to find joy, I wanted you to tap your toes to Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong.”Bunch ensured that the museum would not be understood as a partisan endeavor. He built relationships with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and when it opened in 2016—less than two months before Trump’s first electoral victory—tens of thousands of people attended the festivities. At the dedication, President Barack Obama spoke of how the museum demonstrates “that our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs, but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy.” President Bush praised Bunch for his persistence and determination to bring the museum to life. “It’s really important to understand this project would not and could not have happened without his drive, his energy, and his optimism,” Bush said. (Bunch doubts that he would be able to garner such public support from Republicans today; when he talks with Republican elected officials now, they tell him, “You’ve got to stand firm, but I can’t say anything.”)Trump visited the museum exactly once, during Black History Month in 2017. The president was accompanied by incoming Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Senator Tim Scott, and the conservative activist Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and a vocal Trump supporter. Trump’s team told Bunch that the president did not want to see anything “difficult.” Bunch decided to show Trump the area of the museum that explores the slave trade.In a section of the museum’s history gallery that explores the role the Dutch played, Bunch writes in his memoir, Trump turned to him and said, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”“All I could say,” Bunch recounted in his memoir, “was let’s continue walking.”Evan Vucci / APBunch gave President Trump a tour of the National Museum of African American History in 2017.After that initial trip, which Trump told Bunch he had enjoyed, the president took little interest in the Smithsonian during his first term, even when, in 2019, Bunch became secretary of the entire Smithsonian system, overseeing 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, and several research and education centers. But in recent years, the MAGA movement has become fixated on combatting what Trump’s “truth and sanity” executive order describes as “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The second Trump administration has taken a particularly antagonistic posture toward established institutions with deep ranks of expertise, which has made the Smithsonian a natural political target.Still, although the Smithsonian receives nearly two-thirds of its funding from the federal government, the institution ostensibly preserves some measure of independence through its Board of Regents, keeping it insulated from political winds and top-down directives. The board has the power to hire the institution’s secretary—and to dismiss them.Citizen members of the Board of Regents are themselves selected for six-year terms by other members of the board, and cannot serve more than two terms. All nominees must be approved by Congress and then signed off on by the president. (Unlike at the Kennedy Center, which Trump took over in the early weeks of his second term, the president does not directly appoint members of the board.) Four regents will have reached that two-term limit by the end of this year. Two more were renominated by the board for a second term but have yet to be approved by Congress.The current and looming vacancies, and the need for congressional and presidential approval, raise the possibility that Trump could attempt to install new board members who are loyal to his agenda. (Trump’s March 2025 executive order said that the White House would work with officials “to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”) In April, The New York Times reported that the regents had agreed on nominations for some of the replacements, but the House committee responsible for reviewing and vetting the nominees before they move to the full legislature for approval had yet to receive the names under consideration—intrigue that suggests some manner of strategy, although it’s far from clear whose. Minutes from board meetings earlier this year show that the regents have voted to give existing members additional duties because of the current and expected vacancies.Throughout this presidential term, Bunch has remained loyal to Princy Jenkins’s admonition: showing the public not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember. After the public release of the March 2025 executive order, Bunch sent an internal memo to Smithsonian staff. “We remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans,” he wrote. “We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”Bunch’s background as a historian and former museum curator make him unique among Smithsonian secretaries, which has helped inspire loyalty among the curatorial staff. “Having come up the ranks, he knows what it is to do the job,” Timothy Anne Burnside, a curator of music and performing arts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told me. During his tenure as the museum’s director, it was not uncommon for Bunch to pop into meetings to both encourage and challenge staffers, some told me. And today, he has high expectations for the quality and rigor of curators’ work across the system.Shanita Brackett, the current acting director of NMAAHC, told me that she appreciates the example Bunch has set during this difficult period. “What he’s taught us over the last 14 months is not to be afraid, not to run,” Brackett said. “When you see it, you can embody it.”But anxieties have spiked inside and outside the institution. Last year, a viral article suggested that NMAAHC had removed the famous Woolworth’s lunch counter from an exhibit and was returning a loaned Bible and Black-history book to a civil-rights leader. Observers clamored that the museum was acquiescing to Trump. But the story wasn’t true. The lunch counter and stools had never been removed. And the museum regularly cycles objects on and off public display for preservation reasons. (The Smithsonian said that it is also regular museum practice to return loaned items once the terms of the loan have expired.)“Let me be really clear,” Bunch said in March at an event with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “There is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian. I don’t care what you hear. The artifacts that are there are still there. The interpretations are still there.”Bunch has been cast by many of his admirers as something of a resistance figure—one of the only high-profile leaders standing up to Trump by single-handedly preventing the president from rewriting American history itself. “He is a rock star,” Burnside said. She recounted traveling with Bunch to various museum and history conferences over the years. “There is a mob of people around him. And they want selfies, and they want to shake his hand, and they want to say thank you.”She went on: “I cannot think of anyone else who can walk through a hotel conference center and have a trail of people following him, sneaking pictures with their phones.” When I told her, half-jokingly, that she made Bunch sound like the Beyoncé of museums, she nodded enthusiastically. Bunch’s stardom has also translated into real financial benefits for the institutions he’s led. As the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he raised $453 million, and as secretary of the Smithsonian, he has helped raise $2.5 billion in six years.In February, I visited the National Museum of American History with the secretary. As we walked through the museum just when it was opening for the day, I was struck by how many people approached him. Visitors told him, “Keep standing strong,” as though the entire Smithsonian’s future was riding on him. A staff member retrieved a gift for the secretary from his office. “Thank you. Just—thank you,” the staff member said, almost bowing before Bunch as he handed him the small box.Near the entrance, a security guard, who looked to be in his 70s and said he’d worked at various Smithsonian museums for decades, told me, “I’ll stay as long as he stays.”Al Drago / The Washington Post / GettyLonnie Bunch speaks ahead of the recent opening of the "American Aspirations" exhibit commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States, at the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. He co-curated the exhibit.Bunch has not been able to fend off every single effort by the administration. The Smithsonian closed its Office of Diversity following one executive order last year. In May 2025, Trump announced that he had fired the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, despite having no legal authority to do so, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of D.E.I.” In response, the Smithsonian said that only Bunch could remove a director from her post. But a few days later, Sajet resigned, saying she wanted to put the museum first. In July, the National Museum of American History, on its own volition, removed a reference to Trump’s two impeachments from a display case about presidents who had come close to removal from office. The Smithsonian, at the time, asserted that the removal was temporary and part of a larger reimagining of the exhibition. The reference was restored just over a week after a public outcry.In August, a few weeks before Trump’s meal with Bunch, the Trump administration demanded that the Smithsonian hand over a broad array of documents, including exhibit materials, wall texts, internal memos, and plans for forthcoming shows. In December, the White House sent a letter to Bunch saying that the effort “fell far short of what was requested.” The letter subsequently threatened to withhold funding if the requested documents were not turned over within 30 days. “Funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ and the fulfillment of the requests set forth in our Aug. 12, 2025 letter,” the White House wrote. Bunch responded, in a letter obtained by The Washington Post, that the government shutdown had delayed the Smithsonian’s work on this matter and that he would be happy to meet and discuss the institution’s progress.Bunch will admit that there are exhibits within Smithsonian museums that need updating and texts that should be revised. As we walked through the American-history museum, he pointed out places where he would like to amend some of the framings of, and materials in, different exhibits. But that is not unique to the Smithsonian; every museum reassesses its work based on new research and new scholarship. The Smithsonian, known for its deliberateness and even conservativism, is hardly the lefty hotbed depicted by the White House. Nor is Trump the first powerful figure to try to influence its displays. As America approached the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the National Air and Space Museum created an exhibit that included the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima. When members of the public learned of the exhibit, they claimed that it focused too much on Japanese victimhood and the devastation of the bomb, and not enough on Japan’s role as an aggressor. Soon, members of Congress began expressing concern and, under pressure, the museum canceled the entire exhibit, then opened a new exhibit with a more laconic and innocuous framing; there was no interpretation and no graphic images.Perhaps such experiences have made the institution more cautious in its approach over time. Simply existing as a national museum system is difficult for the institution, which has an interest in not acquiescing to the whims of any administration, but also in not doing anything that might make it a political flash point.Scrutiny arrives no matter what. The Smithsonian is developing museums focused on women and Latinos in the United States. One fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation said the National Museum of the American Latino “will be another woke abomination” and that it “will go out of its way to become an incubator of grievances.” When a recent bill to establish a location for the Women’s History Museum came up in committee, a group of House Republicans passed an amendment barring the museum from including content about transgender women. The bill failed on the House floor; the museum, for now, is in limbo.In 2020, Republican Senator Mike Lee said of the planned museums, “The last thing we need is to further divide our already divided nation with an array of segregated, ‘separate but equal’ museums for hyphenated identity groups.” Bunch rejects this argument. During his time at the National Museum of American History, he said, he realized that “no one building can tell the story of America. It’s just too complicated; it’s too big.”The Smithsonian is a remarkable American institution. It is visited every year by about 15 million people, who travel from all over the world to see free exhibits spanning the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex, the command module that carried the first human beings to the moon, and the casket of Emmett Till, whose lynching was a catalyst for the civil-rights movement. There are other museums that cover some of the same terrain, but the Smithsonian is singular in both the collective proximity and the reach of its museums. The institution plays an enormous role in shaping the national understanding of science, culture, and history—which may be why the Trump administration is so eager to change it. If the White House can change the story of America, it can use a distorted, ideologically driven history to justify policies of exclusion and erasure.Before the gathering of historians in April, Bunch made clear how high the stakes were. “If the Smithsonian becomes a state-sanctioned place—of state-sanctioned history, art, and culture—then you might as well close the Smithsonian.”