Trump escalates his campaign against Washington’s cultural institutions

For the past 96 days, a huge tarp has hung over the facade of the Kennedy Center, a fitting symbol of Donald Trump’s assault on Washington’s cultural institutions.

Those attacks intensified on Wednesday with the announcement that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is preparing to place a series of signs at the entrance to the National Museum of American History (NMAH) warning visitors about the “personal viewpoints” of those who curate its exhibitions. The White House accuses the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian network, of having “explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage” U.S. citizens.

Once installed, the signs, priced at $7,000 apiece, will join the tarp at the Kennedy Center as symbols of Trump’s determination to turn culture into a vehicle for advancing his MAGA agenda, burnishing his legacy and feeding his ego.

The tarp is a relic of the battle over Trump’s move to add his name to the Kennedy Center. A board of Trump loyalists had approved the name change, but in June, a judge ordered that the giant letters be removed. Dozens gathered to watch in person while tens of thousands followed online, expecting to see the white facade revealed once more. But the tarp never came down.

On Tuesday, the board voted, during a meeting that witnesses said ended with Trump shouting, to proceed with the closure of the institution that the president first announced in February. At the time, he argued that the center required a complete reconstruction because it was “tired, broken, and dilapidated.” Now, after the White House released a video apparently showing part of the grand foyer ceiling collapsing, Trump is threatening to withhold approval for the $257 million renovation unless the institution once again displays his name alongside that of John F. Kennedy, the president in whose honor the center opened in 1971.

On Wednesday, with the Kennedy Center closed since the previous afternoon, a new symbol had been added to the growing list of evidence of Trump’s cultural crusade: barriers workers erected around the institution to block access to the complex on the banks of the Potomac.

The latest chapter in the saga comes less than 50 days before the midterm elections. Polls suggest voters would rather see Trump focused on issues such as inflation and gasoline prices than on the skirmishes of his culture war.

‘Ideological cleansing’

It also comes just a week after Lonnie Bunch III, president of the Smithsonian Institution, announced his resignation. He cited personal reasons, but his departure followed a year and a half of pressure from the Trump administration on the Smithsonian network of 21 national museums and a zoo. The White House set its sights on the institution in March last year with an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which called for what critics described as an “ideological cleansing” of the Smithsonian.

Days after Bunch’s departure, Trump, who had already successfully pushed the National Portrait Gallery to alter how it presented him, ordered the Smithsonian to replace Infinity (1967), José de Rivera’s abstract sculpture outside the National Museum of American History, with a 10-meter-tall statue of George Washington.

In an unprecedented blurring of the roles of president and museum curator, Trump also demanded in a social media post that the institution mount an exhibition devoted to the first U.S. president and keep it on display for “five years.”

Beyond its artistic value, Infinity is a symbol of Washington’s modernization. It was the first work of modern sculpture to break into the then overwhelmingly neoclassical landscape of the National Mall, an aesthetic Trump has repeatedly sought to revive.

Nor is it the only piece of public art in the capital to make political headlines in recent days. The order to dismantle and remove Joel Shapiro’s Blue (2019) from the plaza outside the Kennedy Center earlier this month provided yet another example of the president’s hostility toward modern and contemporary art.

The warnings that Burgum is preparing to place at the entrance to the NMAH stem from a 160-page report, complete with 500 footnotes, released on July 4, the nation’s 250th birthday. Its anonymous authors accused the museum of focusing too heavily on the Founding Fathers’ contradictions, slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. They also faulted it for presenting an unflattering account of Christianity’s role in the nation’s founding and for engaging in activism “against white people” and in favor of transgender people and “illegal” immigrants.

In a phone interview, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, a public historian at American University in Washington, described the White House report as “ridiculous and absurd” and Trump’s attacks on cultural institutions as “classic authoritarian tactics.” “In the Smithsonian’s case, they also show ignorance about how it functions,” she added.

“NMAH exhibitions host an immense range of ideological viewpoints,” the expert said. “And during their development they undergo multiple peer reviews and consultations with communities and stakeholders. They are never at the whim of curators, who, moreover, are historians of the highest caliber who leave positions at prestigious universities to serve the public.”

Rymsza-Pawlowska also rejected the need for an exhibition about Washington. “There is already a museum entirely dedicated to him, Mount Vernon, a twenty-minute drive away,” she noted.

She also trusts that NMAH visitors will understand how much of Trump’s attacks are “political pantomime.” For regulars of the Kennedy Center — an institution with which many of the city’s music lovers have almost emotional ties — it is already too late.

Shortly after returning to the White House, Trump moved to put the center at the service of MAGA ideals. He dismissed its board, installed himself as chairman and replaced members with loyalists with no experience in cultural management or philanthropy. He then added his own name to the center’s. And when boos during visits by Trump and members of his administration, together with artist boycotts, subscriber cancellations and falling ticket sales, compounded the turmoil, he concluded that the institution should be shut down for a sweeping renovation, one he now says depends on the courts ruling in his favor.

Toni Codinas, one of such patron, says that over these 18 months he has felt, in order, “incredulity,” “anger” and “sadness.” Incredulity “at how easily he took control of the center” with “brazen disregard for norms and a politics of faits accomplis.” Anger when he turned it “into a MAGA party venue and an example of his administration’s rampant corruption, using the opera to screen Melania’s documentary or to throw a FIFA party [for the World Cup draw].”

The sadness, says Codinas, a board member of the Washington Bach Consort, stems from seeing how Trump “has pummeled the remnants” of the Kennedy Center, whose facade remains shrouded, 96 days later, by a giant tarp that stands as a reminder of Trump’s attacks on the capital’s cultural institution.

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