The Smithsonian Exhibit That Doesn't Exist Yet

Kevin Roberts says the Smithsonian's women's history museum has a planned exhibit celebrating male athletes in women's sports. We rate that mostly false — truth score 0.2, confidence 0.75.

The sentence is real and it's in a federal executive order. What isn't real is the exhibit, the museum building, or any source the order ever cited.

On the 26 August 2026 episode of The Kevin Roberts Show with Larry O'Connor — "How We Take Back the Smithsonian From the Communists" — Roberts describes "a planned exhibit that will celebrate the achievement of male competitors in women's sports." O'Connor upgrades it: the women being honored "are actually men."

The steelman is strong. Executive Order 14253, signed 27 March 2025, contains that assertion word for word. Interim director Lisa Sasaki did tell the New York Times in 2023 that the museum wanted to be inclusive of transgender women. And there is genuine Smithsonian trans-athlete content — the Nike-sponsored "Change YOUR Game," which puts Lia Thomas on a wall and asks visitors "fair or foul?"

That exhibit is at the National Museum of American History. It's a visitor poll, not a celebration. And the executive order cited nothing at all: no planning document, no curator, no memo has surfaced in eighteen months. The women's history museum has no building and no site; its only launched exhibition is digital, profiling five historical women, none of them athletes. In May 2026 the House rejected the museum's authorizing bill 204–216 over the fight about this exact question.

We do not know whether the White House had a source. We could not establish who directs the museum today. And our link between "Change YOUR Game" and the order's drafting is inference, not a documented chain.