President Donald Trump had lunch on Thursday with Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, according to the New York Times.
The meeting suggests that the Trump administration and the Smithsonian are in communication, even as the President continues to target its museums in official mandates, White House communications, and social media posts.
Last week, for example, the White House released a bullet-pointed list of artworks at the Smithsonian’s museums that it appeared to denounce, including a painting of refugees along the US-Mexico border and a portrait of Anthony Fauci. Amy Sherald’s painting of a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty was also on that list; Sherald had planned to include it in her National Portrait Gallery survey, but she pulled that show after the museum allegedly asked her to take that piece out of the exhibition.
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The list followed an executive order earlier this year in which Trump claimed that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” something he promised to remedy. He also has described the Smithsonian as being “OUT OF CONTROL” on Truth Social, his social media platform.
So far, there have not been many changes to Smithsonian programming, but Trump has called on his lawyers to conduct a review of the Smithsonian’s displays. It isn’t clear what legal authority Trump would have over that situation, as he isn’t on the Smithsonian’s board.
The Times report did not include details about what Bunch and Trump discussed during their lunch. A White House spokesperson told the Times that the meeting was “productive and cordial”; a Smithsonian representative did not respond.
Previously, the White House has been antagonistic toward Bunch. In April, the White House’s communications director said, “Lonnie Bunch is a Democrat donor and rabid partisan who manufactured lies out of thin air in order to boost sales of his miserable book. Fortunately, he, along with his garbage book, are complete failures.”
In that book, a 2019 memoir called A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama and Trump, Bunch denounced some of Trump’s behavior. In one segment, Bunch describes Trump’s response to an exhibition about the role of the Dutch in the trade of enslaved people. Trump allegedly said that “they love me in the Netherlands.” Bunch wrote, “I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history.”