In Smithsonian Role, John Roberts Encounters History, Pandas and Trump

On June 9, the leadership of the Smithsonian gathered for a quarterly, but hardly routine, meeting behind closed doors.

President Trump had already called out the Smithsonian for being part of a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history” and announced he was firing the head of its National Portrait Gallery.

Now the Smithsonian’s board planned to discuss a response — a resolution carefully calibrated to avoid a confrontation with the president. The resolution would reinforce that only the Smithsonian had the power to fire its museum leader, but would also order a full review of Smithsonian content for bias.

After the resolution had been introduced, Representative Carlos Gimenez of Florida, a Republican board member, interrupted, proposing instead that the board fire the gallery director, as Mr. Trump had sought. His effort was quickly shut down by the Smithsonian’s chancellor — the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr.

“We already have a motion on the floor,” Chief Justice Roberts said, according to three people with knowledge of the proceedings.

The original resolution succeeded. The meeting quickly moved on.

If the moment was unusually tense for a gathering of a museum board, the intervention by the chief justice, a committed parliamentarian, was not. As chancellor, he is known to preside over meetings with a strict focus on rules and procedures, assiduously avoiding partisan debates — a demeanor that aligns with his reputation as an institutionalist and incrementalist jurist.

Since 1851, the chief justice of the Supreme Court has served as chancellor of the Smithsonian — a role that involves running the board meetings but also includes perks like getting an early look at the National Zoo’s newborn pandas.

For Chief Justice Roberts, though, the role recently has placed him in an unenviable position — helping to lead an institution in the crosshairs of President Trump.

Chief Justice Roberts’s role as chancellor may never bring him into a direct confrontation with the president, but his leadership post offers a window into the delicate, potentially fraught dance between a president and a powerful jurist who is, by all accounts, smitten with the Smithsonian.

“All of a sudden it becomes a political battleground and I think that’s disorienting for a lot of people, but if you’re the chief justice it’s got to be challenging for a lot of reasons,” said Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who worked closely with the chief justice as director of the judiciary’s educational and research center. “I think he’s well aware of the awkwardness.”

A Longstanding Leadership Role

The chief justice’s guiding role at the Smithsonian goes back nearly as far as the institution itself.

The Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, was created by Congress in 1846 after a British chemist and mineralogist left his fortune to create “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” in the U.S. capital.

Congress, which provides the lion’s share of the Smithsonian’s budget, turned over the responsibility for running the institution to a 17-member board, known as the Board of Regents, that includes the chief justice, the vice president, six members of Congress and nine citizens.

At first, the vice president had served as chancellor, but in 1851, the role was taken over by then-Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — best known for writing the infamous Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery and fueled the Civil War.

The chancellor position is largely ceremonial, and there is typically little overlap between the court and the institution aside from when the Smithsonian has featured exhibitions on topics that came before the court. When William H. Rehnquist was chief justice, the National Museum of American History presented an exhibit on the landmark school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education and he took the entire court to see it.

But Chief Justice Roberts, who declined to comment on his Smithsonian position, is not the first leader of the court to be thrust into controversies over the institution’s collections and place in American life.

During the Civil War, the Board of Regents, led by Justice Taney, faced controversy over the museum’s refusal to allow an abolitionist lecture series to use the Smithsonian auditorium, a cavernous space inside the famed castle-like building on the National Mall. The museum eventually agreed to host the series, but blocked Frederick Douglass, the leading African American abolitionist, from speaking.

The Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, who is the institution’s chief executive and its first Black leader, reflected on the controversy at his 2019 installation ceremony.

“Today we are here speaking in a place as an African-American, where Frederick Douglass could not speak, but we are a different institution,” Mr. Bunch told those gathered, including Chief Justice Roberts.

‘A Great Side Gig’

When Chief Justice Roberts, a history buff, joined the high court in 2005, nominated by President George W. Bush, he seemed a natural fit for the Smithsonian.

In speeches, the chief justice often tells an anecdote about how he had wanted to become a historian, but changed his mind after a taxi driver told him that he, too, had been a history major at Harvard.

Leaders of the Smithsonian have praised Chief Justice Roberts for his steady leadership.

“He is really in control,” said David M. Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group private equity firm and a former Regent, during remarks in 2019. “There are no 5-to-4 votes. Everything is unanimous. When the chief says this is what he wants done, we recognize that he has the ultimate authority.”

Mr. Rubenstein added that the chief justice took his responsibilities “very seriously,” and that “he comes to every single meeting he’s supposed to, runs the meeting, and could not be a better chancellor.”

In public remarks, Chief Justice Roberts has appeared to relish the role and the perks that come with it, calling the post at one point a “nice distraction.”

In one speech, he said he found it “liberating” when other board members didn’t expect him to be an expert in the Smithsonian’s sometimes arcane matters.

“It’s also very valuable, you know, when a panda is born — because you get to go see it right away,” he added.

At another appearance in 2022, the chief justice called his position at the Smithsonian a “historical accident,” adding that it had “resulted in some wonderful moments” for him.

He described the excitement of touching the robes of the first chief justice, John Jay. “The curator was not looking at the time, because you are not supposed to do that,” he joked.

He cajoled the Smithsonian into loaning the court Louis Armstrong’s trumpet so that the famed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis could play it at a court ceremony.

“The curator again was not too keen on the idea, but we got the trumpet for him, and it was such a joy to watch him play and to think of the history behind it,” Chief Justice Roberts said, adding that his role as chancellor was “a great ‘side-gig,’ and I’m happy to have it.”

When the Supreme Court itself becomes a focus of the Smithsonian’s attention, the overlap in the chief justice’s roles can become more awkward.

In 2016, for example, when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened to fanfare, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to serve on the court, was featured in an exhibit. But Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s second Black jurist, was only mentioned in a display that reported Anita Hill’s accusations that he had sexually harassed her. Several conservative lawmakers accused the Smithsonian of bias.

Justice Roberts never commented publicly on the controversy, and it is unclear if he played a role in easing tensions. The Board of Regents discussed the matter at a January 2017 meeting, where they were told the museum had arranged for curators to speak with members of Congress and their staffs, and that senior Smithsonian staff had met with lawmakers. But the meeting minutes show that the chief justice did not come to the meeting until later in the day, per usual.

Though it left up the Hill display, the museum later in 2017 quietly added a display that recognized Justice Thomas in the exhibit that featured Justice Marshall. In the display, Justice Thomas, who has denied Ms. Hill’s account, was pictured as a college student and on the cover of Jet Magazine.

A President With a Smithsonian Agenda

An incident shortly after Mr. Trump’s first election in 2016 helped to fuel the White House’s recent interest in the leadership of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Julian Raven, an artist and ardent Trump supporter, asked the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to display his 2015 acrylic painting of Mr. Trump — “Unafraid and Unashamed,” which showed Mr. Trump next to a rising sun with a bald eagle — during the inauguration.

After the museum refused to exhibit his portrait, Mr. Raven sued. He focused in particular on Kim Sajet, the head of the gallery and the first woman to run it, accusing her of political bias against Mr. Trump.

Federal District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, appeared sympathetic to Mr. Raven, who represented himself. The judge noted in his 2018 ruling that the regents include members of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and compared the governance model to Cerberus, the monstrous, three-headed dog from Greek mythology who guards the gates of the underworld.

But the judge ultimately dismissed the lawsuit.

“Mr. Raven claims that the decision was motivated by political bias, violating his rights under the First and Fifth Amendments,” Judge McFadden wrote. “He may be right about the motivation, but he is wrong about the law.”

In November 2019, Mr. Raven asked the Supreme Court to take his case. About two months later, the justices rejected the matter with a notation that the chief justice had recused himself.

When Mr. Trump returned to office earlier this year, he released a flurry of executive orders, including one in March that focused on the Smithsonian, which relies heavily on federal funds. In the last decade, Mr. Trump declared, the country had “witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history.” He argued that the Smithsonian had “in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”

What is more, the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, directly criticized the leadership of Mr. Bunch, characterizing him as a liar, a failure and a partisan Democrat. In the midst of such rhetoric, several supporters of Mr. Bunch said they hoped that the chief justice’s role at the heart of the Smithsonian’s operations might temper or avert a full-fledged attack on the institution.

Former Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and a longtime Regent who stepped down in 2023, said he viewed the chief justice as a man who believed in the Smithsonian’s mission and independence. “He is not anyone who is going to be pushed around by anybody,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Two months after the executive order, on May 30, Mr. Trump took to social media to announce that he had fired the museum director, Ms. Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.” It is not clear exactly what led to the announcement, but the White House released a long list of bullet-points that it said bolstered the president’s claims. The list included donations to Democrats, the dispute over Mr. Raven’s painting and language from a photo caption of Mr. Trump that included a reference to his impeachments.

Mr. Trump had cited no legal authority for the firing, and the Smithsonian did not follow through on it. Ms. Sajet continued to report to work, though two weeks later she said she had voluntarily chosen to step down. In announcing her move, she seemed to reflect on her efforts to broaden the museum’s perspective.

“Together,” she wrote, “we have worked to tell a fuller, more American story — one that fosters connection, reflection and understanding.”

Experts who are closely watching the Smithsonian say Ms. Sajet’s resignation is unlikely to end the Trump administration’s focus on the institution and the pressure it puts on the Board of Regents, with the chief justice at the fore.

Only last week, the Trump administration expressed satisfaction when an artist, Amy Sherald, canceled a Smithsonian exhibition because she believed the institution, fearing the president, intended to remove her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty. A White House official described the work as an effort “to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens.”

In his executive order, Mr. Trump also asked Vice President JD Vance, a Smithsonian board member, to help ensure that as terms of regents expired, his administration was in a position to appoint citizen members aligned with his values. Representative Gimenez, a newly appointed regent who, like Mr. Vance, has promoted Mr. Trump’s viewpoint to other Smithsonian leaders, did not respond to a request for comment.

Not all of Mr. Trump’s focus on the Smithsonian has been critical. He helped secure a deal with Saudi Arabia to bring two rare Arabian leopards to the National Zoo. The regents voted to approve that cat exhibit at its June 9 meeting, contingent on a $50 million gift from Saudi Arabia.

Judge Fogel said he thought the chief justice viewed his Smithsonian role as “mind-expanding and enjoyable,” and would be likely to recuse himself from any Smithsonian-related matter that might lead to litigation.

Until recently, Judge Fogel said, “I don’t think it’s been a place that’s politically fraught in the sense that the administration is demanding that somebody be fired. That’s happened to a lot of institutions — the Library of Congress, the Holocaust Museum, the Kennedy Center — places that have been above ‘big P’ politics. I think that puts people who saw it as a national service in an awkward position.”

Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written extensively about the Smithsonian, described this moment as unprecedented.

“We have never encountered a political assault — a direct frontal assault on the Smithsonian in this way,” he said. “Therefore, the Board of Regents has become more important politically than it has in any previous moment.”

That puts increased pressure on the chief justice, he said.

“The chief justice has a really interesting aspect in this new political moment in the U.S.,” he said. In the past, “different justices have mostly been a figurehead — no longer.”

Julie Tate and Kitty Bennett contributed research.