For the last two years, everything has implied getting rid of me,” Lonnie Bunch III, the Smithsonian Institution’s secretary, said on Thursday. Following an unremitting pressure campaign from Donald Trump and his administration, Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum for African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), announced his retirement on 9 September.

Bunch insisted, however, that the pressure “was not part of my calculus”, and that his decision to step down was driven by having completed his personal checklist of goals: “First of all, I promised I’d stay a secretary for five years; It’s been eight.” Furthermore, he said that he realized that he wanted to stay through the country’s semiquincentennial celebrations and for the 10th anniversary of the NMAAHC, a museum for which he led the creation.

But there is no ignoring the withering criticism coming from the Trump administration. In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, charging that the Smithsonian “has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology”. Two months later, the president fired Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position”. And that July, the White House released a 162-page report called “Saving America’s Story”, which concluded that the Smithsonian, “under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story”.

Bunch, who is 73, called the criticisms “mischaracterizations” and said, “I think some of this is not understanding how history is done.” He continued: “Not that I’m sort of a progressive narrative guy, but I do believe that America has been made better by struggling with many of these issues.”

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