In September 2026, President Trump demanded that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History commission a monumental statue of George Washington, extending a pattern in which political authority reaches into the curatorial chambers of cultural institutions. The request is less about honoring a founder than about who holds the power to define how a nation remembers itself. At stake is a question as old as public memory: whether the keepers of history serve the truth of the past or the preferences of the present.