Inside Trump’s D.C. Takeover, and the White House Takes On the Smithsonian

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

Today is Wednesday, August 13th.

Here's what we're covering.

I'm just getting back just after 1 a.m.

and I spent the last six or seven hours trying to get a sense of what the new Trump administration initiative looks like on the ground.

My name's Nick.

I'm with the New York Times.

Can you tell me at all what you're doing here or what the mission is?

I will have to refer you to our public affairs office.

Okay.

The first thing I saw tonight was around sunset by the Washington Monument.

About a dozen National Guard troops pulled up in five Humvees and parked practically in the shadow of the monument.

Troops got out, stood around.

All that I saw them do is have one guard member take photos of other guard members who were standing by their Humvees.

There were some tourists who wanted to snap some pictures with the guard members, and they did that very happily.

So I saw you guys arrive and then take some pictures and now heading out.

Yep, we're heading out.

So we just did a presence patrol just to be amongst the people.

Okay.

To be seen.

Yep, yep.

Okay.

Of the people for the people in D.C.

So we're the D.C.

National Guard.

Okay, gotcha.

And then within about two hours, they drove away.

And any idea where you're headed next or what's next for the mission?

I don't know.

My colleague Nicholas Bogolberos was out in Washington, D.C.

last night to cover how President Trump's show of force in the city is taking shape.

Trump has taken control of the city's police department and deployed 800 National Guard members, along with 500 federal agents, to fight what he's called out-of-control crime.

And the White House press secretary promised this is only the beginning.

Over the course of the next month, the Trump administration will relentlessly pursue and arrest every violent criminal in the district who breaks the law, undermines public safety.

In justifying the takeover, the White House has cited false and misleading claims about violent crime in the city, which is actually near a 30-year low.

And it's still unclear exactly what those who've been deployed will do.

Authorities say the National Guard troops, for example, don't have the authority to make arrests.

Their presence is largely a visual show of force.

Meanwhile, federal agents who've been sent into the streets have been involved in about three dozen arrests, according to the White House and the FBI.

Yesterday, D.C.'s D.C.'s Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back forcefully on the president's continued portrayal of the city as a crime-ridden hellscape.

We are not 700,000 scumbags and punks.

We don't have neighborhoods that should be bulldozed.

And while we're not without our challenges, we take care of our own business and we take care of our own people.

Bowser urged residents to come together in the face of what she called Trump's authoritarian push.

On Tuesday, the White House said it will begin a comprehensive review of what's on display at the Smithsonian as President Trump tries to reshape one of the country's most prominent cultural institutions.

In a letter to the Smithsonian's director, the administration said it will start scouring the displays, websites, and social media accounts of many of the Smithsonian's museums, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of African American History and Culture.

The goal is to, quote, assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.

In the nuts and bolts of this, this is about museum labels and text.

It can be quite kind of boring stuff, but in truth, it's the big picture of how America sees itself.

President Trump is trying to change the story America tells about itself.

My colleague Graham Boley has been reporting on how Trump has been turning up the pressure on the Smithsonian.

Earlier this year, he signed an executive order claiming the institution had, quote, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology, and that it featured exhibits that, quote, portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.

While the president technically doesn't control the museums, his administration has enormous leverage since the Smithsonian gets about two-thirds of its budget from the federal government.

And Graham says that after the White House conducts its review, the Smithsonian will then have 120 days to replace any content the administration objects to.

The historians we have spoken to in our reporting are very alarmed.

This is an unprecedented assault, is the word they use, on the presentation of American history and culture, which in their view should be a slow, deliberate academic effort, not this abrupt change when it's not clear who is undertaking these changes and according to what methods.

One historian who I spoke to said this was out of all professional bounds.

They've never seen anything like it before.

Meanwhile, staff at the National Park Service are facing a September deadline from the administration to remove or cover up all content that, in its view, inappropriately disparages Americans, past or living.

The Secretary of the Interior said he wants to, quote, remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.

According to internal Park Service documents, some of the signage that's been flagged for review includes an exhibit on the brutality of slavery in Philadelphia and a sign at a national monument in Florida that tells the story of imprisoned Native Americans.

Critics of the administration's effort warn that it could effectively censor entire parts of American history, and the former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park told the Times: We have things in our history that we are not proud of, but that, quote, we shouldn't just tell all the things that make us look wonderful.

The Times has learned that federal investigators think Russia is at least partly responsible for a recent hacking campaign targeting federal court records.

Officials say the hackers, who they described as persistent and sophisticated, breached a computer system that manages those documents, including highly sensitive information that could reveal intelligence sources or the names of people people charged with national security crimes.

Officials the Times talked with said hackers have been targeting those records for years, going back to at least 2021, and it's led the courts to take special precautions to protect the data.

That's included giving judges burner phones and alternate email addresses, and even hand delivering some records that were particularly sensitive.

Since they learned about the latest hacking efforts, courts have taken even more protective measures.

One judge actually prohibited uploading sealed documents to one federal database altogether.

Officials are still scrambling to assess the full scale of the most recent breach.

Notably, a number of the cases hackers targeted involved people with Russian or Eastern European names.

News of the breach comes just days before President Trump is set to meet with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

In the past, Trump has downplayed efforts by Russia to hack the U.S., even as his own officials accuse the country of repeated cyber attacks.

And finally, a strange little phenomenon is playing out in the music world.

Record labels are finding that on streaming, audiences are stumbling across songs that are 20, 30, even 60 years old, and they're suddenly getting millions of new listens.

To try and capitalize on this, labels are going back and creating music videos for songs that never had them in the first place.

For example, the group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah just came out with a video for its biggest hit, which came out in 2005.

And LL Cool J's Rock the Bells from 1985 got a new video last year.

The idea is that a video can play on original fans' nostalgia, but also draw new audiences or even go viral on social media.

The strategy has some artists going all out.

This summer, the Talking Heads released a video for their 1977 song, Psycho Killer, starring the Oscar-nominated actress Sergea Ronin.

Releasing a new video for their nearly 50-year-old song, Worked.

The Psycho Killer video hit a million views in just 24 hours.

And not only did streams for the song itself surge, listenership for the Talking Heads' entire catalog got a boost.

Those are the headlines.

Today on the Daily: How President Trump Has Turned His Retribution Campaign Against Former President Barack Obama.

You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

We'll be back tomorrow.