By Bianca Flowers and Donna Bryson
CHICAGO, Sept 8 (Reuters) – The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution announced on Tuesday that he was retiring after months of accusations from the Trump administration that the national museums he led portrayed a skewed and divisive version of the U.S.
Historian, curator and author Lonnie Bunch has led the Smithsonian as its secretary since 2019. The Smithsonian has 21 museums and galleries, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, and a number of research and education centers.
Bunch said in a statement that his departure comes with “mixed emotions and heartfelt gratitude.”
“It is time for my next chapter, a chapter that will allow me to continue to protect the integrity of the Smithsonian and to champion the importance of a history that illuminates and celebrates the complex story of our nation,” Bunch said.
He is expected to step down by the end of the year.
After receiving the news, Chief Justice John Roberts, who also serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said, “Secretary Bunch has pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story.”
Bunch, the Smithsonian’s first Black leader, took the top role after developing and opening the Smithsonian’s popular National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has been vilified by U.S. President Donald Trump and long targeted by conservatives. Bunch also held positions at the institution’s National Museum of American History.
The Trump administration had been steadily increasing pressure on Bunch and the Smithsonian in what critics fear is part of a broader campaign to tell America’s story from a conservative and even white supremacist point of view.
On July 4, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the White House posted on its website a report by its Domestic Policy Council that evokes culture war issues in accusing Smithsonian leaders, particularly those at its National Museum of American History, of engaging in “anti-white activism,” advocating for “citizenship for illegal aliens,” lionizing Marxists and producing exhibitions and educational materials that “treat biological males as girls or women.”
The report suggests that “it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”
Bunch sent a memo to his staff a few days after the report was released saying that “while there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History.”
Trump has 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 — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
In a letter last week, the Trump administration threatened to cut federal agencies’ support for the Smithsonian.
The New York Times said on Tuesday that Bunch said in an interview that the pressure from the White House had led to his departure. But he acknowledged the strain of the role.
“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” he told the Times. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”
In an essay marking the 250th anniversary in the Smithsonian Institution’s flagship magazine, Bunch did not shy from stances that Trump has made controversial, including lauding the contributions to the nation made by immigrants and by those who arrived enslaved and their descendants, saying of the latter two that they saw in the U.S. “the potential to eventually become the land of freedom.”
“We must tell the unvarnished histories of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the moments of glory and infamy alike,” Bunch added in the essay. “An incomplete telling of our past, with rough edges smoothed, inhibits the country’s ability to forge a better shared future.”
Trump announced in May of 2025 that he was firing Kim Sajet, the first woman to direct the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, accusing her of supporting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. It was unclear whether Trump had the legal authority to fire her. Sajet resigned the next month.
Trump signed an executive order in March directing Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board of regents, to remove “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution. The order singled out the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which Bunch began developing in 2005 and opened in 2016, realizing a century-old goal.
Conservatives have depicted museums with an ethnic lens as inherently divisive.
Bunch said in a memoir about developing the African American history museum that his goal was a museum about African Americans that helped all Americans understand that they had a shared if fraught history and common hopes for a better future.
In the book he described giving a tour of the museum to Trump in early 2017. Bunch wrote that ahead of the visit, aides to the president, who had been elected just weeks before the museum opened, expressed concern that he was in a bad mood and did not want to see anything “difficult.” Bunch started the tour in the museum’s exhibit on slavery.
(Reporting by Donna Bryson and Bianca Flowers; Editing by Mark Porter)
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