The sculpture that Donald Trump wants removed from the National Mall has a reputation even among its admirers for being a bit inscrutable. Dedicated in 1967 at what is now the National Museum of American History, José de Rivera’s Infinity looks, fittingly, like an infinity symbol with an extra twist. (A bow? A pretzel?) By pairing the technical prowess required to create smooth, curved metal with the delicate spinning of a music box, the slow-turning work seems to take a different form each time you pass it. The museum’s architect, Walker O. Cain, wrote that Infinity “has the characteristic of stimulating everyone who has seen it to create his own personal imaginative interpretation.”But the president does not appear to have been stimulated. “That strange modernist sculpture tells visitors nothing about America, inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday night. Trump insisted that the Smithsonian replace Infinity with a 30-foot high “Colossus” of George Washington. In the same post, he called for the mounting of a five-year exhibition about the Founding Father to open immediately (museum shows of such magnitude typically take years to plan), and said the museum should create a “Center for American Heroes.” Trump also wrote that the institution should add another, 11-foot-tall Washington statue to the museum’s Flag Hall. That one was displayed at the Grand Prix race held in Washington, D.C., this summer as part of Trump’s Freedom 250 festivities. He’d like it dedicated at the museum this Thursday.Trump’s latest demands might be partially understood as a test of how far he can push an institution that he does not control. They came just three days after the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie Bunch, announced his upcoming retirement, following a year and a half of standing between the museum complex and the White House. In a July executive order, the president called on the National Park Service, which is part of the executive branch, to place signs outside the National Museum of American History accusing it of partisan bias.Few would question the appropriateness of having a healthy amount of George Washington in an American-history museum, but Trump’s ask might be a little too redundant. For one thing, a Washington sculpture can already be found on the museum’s second floor. Classical in style and portraying the first president as a kind of Zeus figure, Horatio Greenough’s 1841 statue boasts chiseled muscles that rival even the machismo AI depictions Trump circulates of himself and Washington online. And when approached from the east, Rivera’s Infinity—the aspirational site of Trump’s Washington colossus—elegantly frames another abstract form: the obelisk known as the Washington Monument.Trump’s call for changes to the museum fits a few recent patterns: He has been on a campaign to institute his preferred version of history in the national museum system. He has begun to leave his mark, and occasionally his name, across the architectural landscape of Washington, D.C. And while doing so, he appears to have indicated a distaste for abstract art. Earlier this month, the Kennedy Center, which Trump controls, took down Joel Shapiro’s playful metal sculpture Blue. When the Trump administration—addressing a controversy at the National Portrait Gallery last year—criticized a decidedly representational Amy Sherald painting of a trans woman as Lady Liberty, part of its complaint was that, in the words of the administration, “the Statue of Liberty is not an abstract canvas for political expression.” The use of abstract reads like an insult. Trump has pushed a classical makeover in D.C.. He has issued executive orders mandating classical designs as the default for new federal buildings, for example, and remounted figurative statues that were torn down during the Black Lives Matter movement. He has mused about the White House upgrading its columns to a higher Greek order (adding more classical to the neoclassical); his most prized project, the White House ballroom, looks like a Corinthian-columned department store. In his first executive order on architecture, he said federal buildings should command respect.When it comes to the Rivera outside the National Museum of American History, Trump’s issue with it—and with abstraction largely—might not be that the sculpture “says nothing about America,” but that it doesn’t say what he wants it to. That is, he can’t control what it says at all.The American artist Robert Motherwell wrote in a 1951 essay celebrating abstraction that one of the most striking aspects of the approach is its “nakedness,” or the way it turns, with such decisiveness, away from the symbols we know. “How many rejections on the part of her artists! Whole worlds—the world of objects, the world of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the world of fetishes and ancestor worship,” he wrote. With abstract works such as Infinity, we’re free to find our own reading—or not.Whereas abstraction attempts to reject passed-down meanings, the image of George Washington is layered with them. Part of what is so moving about, say, getting up close to Washington’s military uniform at the National Museum of American History is the way it challenges how we’ve come to see him as an icon rather than as an actual person.[Read: A strikingly complex portrait of a Founding Father]Abstraction has long been subject to right-wing attacks. During the Red Scare, for instance, George A. Dondero, a U.S. representative from Michigan, crusaded to rid American art of what he saw as communist influence. In a 1949 speech that could be ripped from Truth Social today, he framed a list of 20th-century art movements as un-American weapons for destruction: “Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane,” he said. “Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.”Sure, the unpredictable responses to abstract art—the brainstorms—can be a little intimidating. How many of us have stood, a bit clueless, before Jackson Pollock’s riotous colors or Cy Twombly’s frenetic scratches and wondered if we might need a Ph.D. for this?But there’s also a certain joy to find in it. One National Museum of American History curator, David Shayt, embraced the compounding, shifting meanings of abstraction in a 2008 essay about the museum’s Rivera. The sculpture marked an early work of abstract art commissioned by the U.S. government, but, Shayt argues, the commission was more about the government’s belief that Rivera, a prominent abstract-expressionist sculptor known for his twisting metal forms, could capture the museum’s dual identity in its early days as the National Museum of History and Technology. Cain, the architect, had convinced the government that the sculpture would be a mechanical model of the solar system, a “twenty-first-century orrery.” But Rivera, who cited the abstractionist Piet Mondrian and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși as among his influences, asserted no such thing. “What I make represents nothing but itself,” he said.That didn’t stop the National Museum of American History’s staff from making their own meaning over the years, particularly as employees of a “pragmatic museum of history rather than a museum of art,” Shayt wrote. “Is it a mathematical symbol? A wisp of battlefield smoke? A tennis stroke?” he asked of Infinity. One of the sculpture’s greatest attributes, he continued, is “an expressiveness that can evolve in step with the evolution of the museum whose entrance it fronts.”For an example of the kind of aesthetic Trump prefers, you don’t have to go far from the Rivera. A short walk brings you to Freedom Plaza, where the National Park Service has installed a pop-up exhibition for the nation’s 250th birthday. Rows of traditional, metal statues of Revolutionary War soldiers line the plaza—many, notably, represent enslaved individuals. Standing on a high plinth, meanwhile, is Caesar Rodney, a slaveholder and Declaration of Independence signer, who looms over the display. The statue had been removed in Delaware during the Black Lives Matter protests, only to be restored in Washington as some conservatives began championing him as a symbol of the left’s overreach. Trump has placed a similar style of traditional statue—direct, simple—throughout the White House Rose Garden and envisions much of the same for the Garden of American Heroes, another of his planned D.C. projects, where abstraction is explicitly forbidden. There’s very little room for interpretation in these sorts of statues. They mean what they mean.Much of the Trump-era fight over history has boiled down to a struggle about trust. The Trump administration says the history the Smithsonian tells is not patriotic enough; the institution counters that Americans can hold patriotism and complexity at once. The National Museum of American History museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, told a congressional committee this summer: “Telling our history fully is not anti-American. It is a form of respect for the American people.” Abstraction, too, holds a kind of esteem for its viewers, trusting them to navigate its symbol-less terrain. In his essay, Motherwell wrote that the emergence of abstract art is one sign that there are still people who “know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear.”On the west side of the museum stands another abstract piece, a massive, 40-foot Alexander Calder that the museum calls a “monument to modernity.” Its jagged black edges reach outward, conveying a sense of rupture or change. On Saturday, the area around the Calder was roped off with caution tape, surely something to do with conservation or work on the museum grounds. But it felt a little ominous, as though it were a warning not for museumgoers, but for the art itself.