Museum head ousted after Trump sword gift denial

What happened

The director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library was forced out this week after declining to hand over a sword for President Donald Trump to give King Charles III during the president’s recent state visit to Britain, The New York Times reported Thursday. Todd Arrington — a longtime federal historian who had been at the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kansas, for a year — told the State Department he was legally obligated to preserve Eisenhower’s sword for the American people.

Who said what

“They asked for a sword and we said, ‘Well, we do have swords, but we can’t give them away because they’re museum artifacts,’” Arrington told Kansas City NPR affiliate KCUR Thursday. A State Department liaison, using the personal email account “giftgirl2025,” originally contacted Arrington to ask for “like a sword or something,” the Times said. Instead, Arrington said, he worked with officials for two months to find the West Point replica sword Trump gifted to the king.

Arrington told CBS News that officials in the National Archives, which manages 13 presidential libraries, told him to “resign — or be fired” on Monday, because “apparently, they believed I could no longer be trusted with confidential information” about “the sword” and a plan to let the private Eisenhower Foundation build an education center on the federal campus. “I never imagined that I would be fired from almost 30 years of government service for this,” he told the Times.

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What next?

Trump has fired tens of thousands of government workers since taking office and is threatening more mass layoffs during the government shutdown, though “senior federal officials have quietly counseled several agencies” against that, “warning that the strategy may violate appropriations law,” The Washington Post said.