Smithsonian director resigns under White House pressure, is rewarded with demand for a Colossus-sized Washington statue.

…(cont) Lonnie G. Bunch III, 73, the Smithsonian's first Black secretary and founder of its National Museum of African American History and Culture, had led the institution since 2019 and had parried the White House for as long as the arithmetic allowed. On September 8th he announced he would step down. The New York Times, five days later, ran a headline that asked whether the president had won the battle over the Smithsonian. The headline was a question. The record was not.

The reward for the surrender arrived four days after the retirement notice: a demand, reported September 12th, that the Smithsonian install a "Colossus"-sized statue of George Washington inside the National Museum of American History. The demand reflects what the paper called a longstanding desire for "patriotic" history. Whether the museum has room for a colossus was not, as far as the receipts show, a question anyone in the administration thought worth asking first.

The norm is survived by a body that studied the country's past without a permit slip, however briefly. It is preceded in death by the naming rights over the Kennedy Center, argued in court in late August, the same week an executive order renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America." Institutions in this town this year tend to fall together, not one at a time. They fall in the order the paperwork allows.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners write their representative and ask, plainly, who owns the Smithsonian now — and what it cost to find out.