If these were normal times, there would be wistful celebration of Lonnie G. Bunch III’s decision to step down as secretary of the Smithsonian. He has been an enormously consequential leader of one of this country’s most beloved institutions. He served the Smithsonian for almost four decades and brought it both stability and vision as its top leader. Bunch wasn’t just the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. He enlisted an astonishingly broad coalition of people invested in the museum’s success and purpose, including audiences, who have made it one of the essential stops on the Washington pilgrimage.
The Smithsonian, the internationally renowned complex of 21 museums, research centers, libraries and a zoo, had been led largely by outsiders for decades before Bunch arrived. He came to the top role seven years ago as an insider, steeped in the Institution’s values and its sense of purpose. And he ascended to that role at a critical moment in this country’s cultural history, as a new species of politicians, culture warriors and self-appointed social media demagogues were dispensing with even the pretense of polite discourse, reasoned conversation, fact-based ratiocination. Never has the nation more urgently needed to focus on key issues, like climate change and its long history of racial, ethnic and class division, never has it been in greater need of trusted sources and authoritative, accessible scholarship.
Bunch checks on construction progress of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2014. – (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
Bunch confronted this directly, without flinching, and he fought to preserve the independence of the institution. Which is why many people both inside and outside the Smithsonian are not celebrating his departure, even though he is 73 years old, has served tirelessly under extraordinary pressure and has more than earned the right to decide what’s next in life. The Smithsonian is under attack and Bunch has weathered those attacks with grace, a grace which reflected back on the people he led and defended.
Get Seriously? newsletter
Your weekly guide to culture, entertainment, and what everyone is talking about. Sign up for free
The institution has been an administration target since at least March 2025, when President Donald Trump issued his first executive order citing the supposed “anti-American” and “corrosive” ideology in its presentation of history. Vice President JD Vance has led the attack, and he remains a member with outsize influence of the institution’s 17-member Board of Regents. The administration’s surrogates, including Fox News, attacked Bunch personally with headlines like, “Smithsonian exec who said DEI ‘must be at the center’ of institutions is raking in eye-popping salary” (which sat atop an article aggregating four years of his salary into a number that was hardly eye-popping relative to other institutions of similar size and prestige).
The precedents for the institution’s survival as an independent organization in the age of Trump 2.0 are not good. It took less than a year for the administration to run the Kennedy Center into financial ruin, driving away artists, audiences and loyal donors. Scientists are fleeing our federal scientific institutions; lawyers are abandoning the Justice Department. The National Park Service is now being compelled to carry out Trump’s cultural agenda directly, rewriting history and scrubbing away anything that doesn’t fit the happy narrative of American exceptionalism.
The scientists, curators, historians and educators who serve the Smithsonian are largely motivated by a sense of purpose and service. If the administration succeeds in maneuvering an ideologue hostile to independent scholarship into the secretary’s chair, many of them will simply leave, for other opportunities or the salvation of their conscience.
What this administration cannot capture directly of the country’s culture, it destroys with chaos, making life intolerable for people who persevere in the audacious belief that things like “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” actually matter. So even if they can’t find a competent ideologue, they can always find an incompetent and aggressive firebrand, and the Smithsonian will be hollowed out and destroyed from inside, perhaps as rapidly as the Kennedy Center.
Most Read From The Washington Post
The focus now shifts to the regents, who must decide on Bunch’s successor. And one of those regents, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., will be thrust into a role he may very likely not want to play. Roberts serves as the chancellor of the Smithsonian and inside accounts suggest that he has been a low-key, largely ceremonial occupant of that office, the duties of which are vaguely defined beyond serving as “presiding officer” of the regents, which include six members of Congress and (when all slots are filled) nine citizen regents appointed for a maximum of two six-year terms.
The actual or implicit prerogatives of the chancellor may be the only power that can keep the Smithsonian from the path of ruin. Roberts has a reputation as an institutionalist, even as he presided over and sometimes abetted the Supreme Court’s radical consolidation of executive power and its enthusiastic contempt for established precedent. Now comes one of the most consequential tests of that reputation. Will he use his power, even if it is only the power of speaking publicly in defense of the institution, to assure its independence?
Current and former Smithsonian staff and supporters during a public show of support for Bunch in June 2025. – (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post)
As six-year terms expire, the administration will likely move to stack the regents with people who are skilled at trolling and sowing dissension, who belittle genuine scholarship and the importance of the Smithsonian’s founding mission. Congress will decide whether to approve those nominations, which could tip the balance of power on the board. And Congress has been quiescent when it comes to resisting Trump’s cultural initiatives, tacitly allowing things like the deeply unpopular presidential ballroom to go forward without the obligatory congressional approval.
Roberts praised Bunch’s “distinguished service for the past seven years in the Smithsonian’s top job” and noted that he had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story.” But if Roberts wants to see that kind of leadership continue at the Smithsonian, he may have to emerge from the usually invisible, backroom role of chancellor, guiding meetings and setting agendas. That would mean taking up a more explicitly political position. For now, he is one of the few people close to the institution with the gravitas to stand up and say no to Vance and Trump.
That would be in his self-interest and that of the nation’s as well. Because the rule of law depends on a cultivated electorate, cognizant of their history, conversant with the Constitution that binds them together and capable of thinking in concrete, hypothetical and abstract terms. Lonnie G. Bunch III made those prerequisites of self-governance part of the Smithsonian’s fundamental mission. Roberts may be the only person who can preserve them.
