President Trump’s new executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” does just the opposite. It’s a declaration of war on American history, demanding that Smithsonian Institution museums and other facilities whitewash the truth about racism and other ugly chapters of our past and present. The executive order, issued Thursday night, specifically attacks the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the planned American Women’s History Museum, which operates a website but is not expected to open a building for at least 10 years.  In an unprecedented act of political interference in the Smithsonian — which describes itself as “the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo” — the executive order instructs Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties.  The order says the vice president and the Office of Management and Budget will work with Congress to bar funding of “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.” Federal funds provide almost two-thirds of the Smithsonian’s $1 billion annual budget.    What is an “improper ideology”? And what degrades American values? The terms aren’t defined, meaning they can refer to anything Trump doesn’t like.      I love America and believe I’m lucky to live in the greatest nation on Earth, just as millions of my fellow citizens do. But that doesn’t make me blind to the fact that my African ancestors were brought here in chains, brutally enslaved and then treated as second-class citizens long after emancipation. The Smithsonian must not ignore this.    Nor should the Smithsonian ignore that Native Americans were robbed of their lands, that women were long barred from voting and denied other rights, and that the gay, lesbian and transgender communities, Asian Americans, Latinos and religious minority groups have long faced discrimination. The Smithsonian should not pretend that racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice never existed or no longer exist just because that bothers some people. Doing this would turn the institution into a purveyor of lies and propaganda, like the governments of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.  This has nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion, which Trump has demonized and ordered halted. It has everything to do with truth.   I attended the opening of the African American museum in 2016 and have visited again, always moved by how Black Americans rose from slavery to fight for equality and assume our rightful place in our country. I was also moved by the history explained in the National Museum of the American Indian. And I hope to be around to visit the American Women’s History Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino when they open in the next decade.        The job of the Smithsonian is to tell the American story and the stories of other countries accurately — the good, the bad and the ugly — and not to paint a fairy tale version of the past and present. Indoctrinating young Americans with fake history is educational child abuse.     Yet Trump’s executive order demands the censoring of the truth about America.    “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed 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 order states.  “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”   But it’s impossible for the Smithsonian to truthfully tell the American story without mentioning racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, bigotry and flaws.  Should the African American museum say that people of all races were enslaved and that slavery had nothing to do with racism? Should it deny that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War?  Should it portray slavery in a positive light — a beneficial institution that educated Africans from what Trump once called “shithole countries” and gave them valuable job skills, free comfortable housing, good incomes and equal rights with other Americans?  As a Black girl growing up near New Orleans in the 1960s, I learned firsthand about racism. I had to drink from “colored” water fountains and use “colored” restrooms. White parents and students threw eggs at me and other Black students when we integrated an all-white school. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I can count.  Yet my parents, grandparents and enslaved ancestors had it much worse. We’ve made progress on the long road to equality.  This is a story all Americans need to see presented by Smithsonian museums, along with the stories of all other Americans who make up our gloriously diverse population.   Since it was created in 1846 by an act of Congress, the Smithsonian has been run on a nonpolitical basis by historians, scientists and other experts. A board of regents that includes the sitting vice president and chief justice of the U.S. governs the Smithsonian, overseen by Congress. That’s the way it should stay. It would be expensive, chaotic and harmful to require the Smithsonian museums and other facilities to overhaul their exhibits and change the way they tell the story of our country every time a new president enters the White House. It would also insult the public's intelligence to feed them a politicized and sugar-coated version of the American story.     The Smithsonian should be devoted to truth and not some alternative reality. As the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), a pioneering scholar of Black history, said: “Our histories can shape our futures. We must confront the past in order to move forward.” Donna Brazile is a political strategist, a contributor to ABC News and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is the author of “Hacks: Inside the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.”  ...read more read less