Trump’s Smithsonian clash exposes striking pattern among museum curators

The scholars behind a Smithsonian exhibition targeted by the Trump administration have built their careers around the same race, gender, sexuality and social-justice themes now fueling accusations of ideological bias at the museum, a Fox News Digital review found.

Entertainment Nation, which opened in December 2022, is an ongoing exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that uses artifacts from music, film, television, theater and sports to examine how popular culture has shaped American life.

Every member of the exhibit’s seven-person curatorial team has incorporated themes involving racial injustice, gender inequality, sexuality or other progressive social causes into their academic work, public commentary or prior museum projects. Fox News Digital’s review found praise for communist-linked figures, alignment with progressive activist movements and explicit statements connecting museum work to social justice.

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Speaking to Fox News Digital previously, a senior White House official accused Entertainment Nation of promoting "fringe or activist ideologies masquerading as history."

John Troutman, the exhibit’s lead curator, told The Washington Post in 2023 that the project was meant to do more than present a conventional history of entertainment, saying it was not intended to serve as "a gallery that provides a history of entertainment," but instead to examine broader social movements reflected in popular culture.

Troutman’s colleagues have similarly examined entertainment through themes of racial exclusion, gender stereotypes, homophobia and other social conflicts commonly emphasized by the political left.

Curator Kenneth Cohen, for example, published "They Will Have Their Game" in 2017, a book examining how the development of sports in the United States "produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions," according to a description from his publisher. The book, per the description, examines how sports contributed to the "creation of the white male republic" in the United States.

"Although competition and risk were central to understandings of ‘sport’ in early Anglo-America, the formation of a sporting culture based on those elements was not inevitable," Cohen's book reads. "It was a purposeful choice, made largely by empowered white men, to construct sporting culture around traits that encouraged engagement within their ranks and helped to define them as a group despite internal class and ethnic divides."

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Cohen’s colleague on the exhibit, curator Krystal Klingenberg, has similarly focused much of her scholarship on music, race, social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement.

For another Smithsonian project she worked on in 2022, Klingenberg stated that her goal was to "connect history with the ongoing fight for civil rights and social justice in American society." Klingenberg lists "social justice" as one of her scholarly interests on her CV, alongside a number of scholarly projects related to it.

Among them are an academic discussion she facilitated dubbed "​​Black Lives Matter: Music, Race, and Justice," a presentation on ethnomusicology she gave titled "American Hate: How Do We Respond?" and another talk she gave called "Teaching Race and Ethnicity Through Music: Intersectionality."

Klingenberg also co-hosted the Collected podcast where she examined "why Black feminist critique remains crucial to understanding the times we are living in."

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All seven curators have, to varying degrees, examined race, gender, sexuality, inequality or identity in their academic or museum work.

Fox News Digital reached all seven curators and the Smithsonian for comment.

The current conservative crusade against the Smithsonian launched in March 2025 when President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to review the Smithsonian's exhibits and programs. 

Allegations of bias in Entertainment Nation drew renewed national attention in July amid a congressional hearing scrutinizing the National Museum of American History and the release of a 162-page White House report documenting what the administration described as evidence of ideological bias across the Smithsonian. 

"American taxpayers should not be funding institutions that undermine our country or promote one-sided, divisive political narratives," a White House official previously told Fox News Digital. "The Smithsonian Institution should present history in a way that is accurate, balanced and consistent with the values that make the United States of America exceptional."

The White House official’s criticism followed reports in 2025 of displays within Entertainment Nation that allegedly used left-of-center language to portray America negatively.

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These displays included a section that claimed circuses "expressed the colonial impulse to claim dominion over the world," a placard arguing that Mickey Mouse’s "outsized facial features, white gloves and trickster temperament were vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy," and a placard describing Alexander Hamilton as an "influential and flawed founding father," language the White House report criticized as unfairly diminishing him.

Some of the curators have publicly commented on their rationale behind procuring specific items for the exhibit.

Ryan Lintelman, another of Entertainment Nation’s curators, was instrumental in acquiring one of the iconic red costumes from the Hulu adaptation of "The Handmaid’s Tale," according to an interview he gave to Variety. The dystopian novel written by feminist author Margaret Atwood depicts a world where America has become a totalitarian theocracy that strips females of their rights and forces fertile women, known as "Handmaids," into reproductive servitude.

Lintelman stated that the costume’s importance to liberal protest movements motivated his work to acquire one for the Smithsonian.

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"I believe that popular culture is a unique and accessible lens to introduce the museum’s audiences to complex narratives involving race, sexuality, gender, identity, representation, economics, migration, social change, and power," he wrote for his Smithsonian biography.

The 2017 Women’s March, where the Handmaid’s costume featured prominently, was seen as one of the most important early expressions of resistance to the first Trump administration. Theodore Gonzalves, another Entertainment Nation curator, also cited the march approvingly in a 2018 essay praising Barbara Dane, a lifelong socialist and former Communist Party USA member.

Dane was an acclaimed folk musician who spent much of her career involved in left-wing politics, most notably defying the United States government by visiting Cuba while it was under the rule of dictator Fidel Castro. She went on to found a record label that produced songs praising communist figures such as Mao Zedong, calling him China’s "savior," and Ho Chi Minh, actively supporting America’s enemy in the Vietnam War.

Gonzalves described Dane as "singing truth to power" and creating music that "reflected the stakes and the hopeful dreams of millions trying to make sense of a world dominated by superpowers with world-ending weaponry."

Gonzalves, whose scholarship has examined historical abuses against Asian Americans, also uses the term "Filipinx" in his work – which is a gender-neutral term for Filipinos similar to the term "Latinx."

Ashley Mayor, another Entertainment Nation curator who specializes in "Latinx and Afro-Latinx music and culture," regularly shares posts from left-wing organizations on social media. Eric Jentsch, the seventh curator, has also written about race and racism in American sports history, Fox News Digital found.

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In its July report, the White House charged that the Smithsonian "no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens."