For a moment, Lonnie Bunch III, the newly appointed Smithsonian Secretary, thought President Trump was going to surprise him, The Washington Post reports.
When Bunch was serving as the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017, he personally guided Trump on a tour of the museum, shortly before the then-president-elect took office.
Bunch reportedly writes in his upcoming memoir, A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama and Trump, that the tour started in the history galleries, which begin with the global slave trade. Trump reportedly paused in front of a section on the role of the Dutch in the slave trade, and Bunch remembers thinking Trump was genuinely engaging with the museum's historical content. That is, until Trump turned toward Bunch and said to him "You know, they love me in the Netherlands." Bunch writes that he was essentially at a loss for words.
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"There is little I remember about the rest of the hour we spent together," Bunch writes. "I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history."
The Trump administration also reportedly initially requested to tour the museum on Martin Luther King Day and asked that it be closed to visitors. But Bunch said "the notion that we could shut out visitors on the first King holiday since the opening of the museum was not something I could accept." Read more at The Washington Post.
