Is Anyone Going to Save the Smithsonian Museums from Destructo Don?

A tan Statue of Liberty proudly shoves a ripe, red, late summer tomato into the air, a more delectable replacement for her tired torch. A basket of more perfect-looking tomatoes, ideal for a caprese salad or simple tomato sandwich, is tucked under her arms. It doesn’t take a trained art history snoot to understand the significance of this symbolic alternative Lady Lib. Though it also wouldn’t look out of place propped in the corner of an Italian restaurant, the sculpture evokes the immigrant workers who pick the produce American citizens devour without a passing thought about the exploited, low-paid, hard-working labor that brought it to their kitchen table. The simplicity of this artwork is the point. She was made by Kat Rodriguez to be carried either on a flatbed truck or on the shoulders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a collective of farmworkers, through the highways of Florida for their 2000 “March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage.”

Do you need a moment to breathe into a paper bag? To process? To unpack? Do you feel triggered? Are you rattling your fists at the sky and shouting “DEI”? Are you howling into the abyss, yanking at your hair, that anyone DARE replace the Statue of Lib’s usual “Tired, poor…etc etc” bit for a corresponding sign with a snippet from a Langston Hughes poem?

Me neither.

But, apparently, the CIW Statue of Liberty shook up someone at the White House. Libs was included in a list of artworks, performances, online shows, pulled PDFs requiring links from the Wayback Machine, nearly decade-old blog posts by interns, Pride flags, and other evidence of perceived woke crimes against art and history at the various D.C. Smithsonian museums in a post on the White House’s website, entitled, like a pseudo-article, “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.” Given no context other than that headline, this list of grievances intends to support the Micromanager in Chief’s forthcoming museum meddling, another hostile takeover of D.C. cultural institutions, like his storming of the Kennedy Center to transform it into an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan club (It’s not lost on me that Trump is honoring Michael Crawford, The Phantom, at the Kennedy Center this year). Now, the reason for the Kennedy Center occupation becomes clearer once you realize Trump is nothing but a frustrated Broadway producer, with only one failed production of Paris Is Out! on his theatrical resume from when he was 24.

So, what’s Trump’s beef with the Smithsonian—and museums generally? Is it because his photograph in the presidential portraits wing of the National Portrait Gallery looks nefarious and embarrassingly low effort when compared with the other paintings? Is it because he sucks as a painting subject generally? Is he trying to boot out everything else in the museums so he can launch a major retrospective of MAGA Langelo? Is Trump also a frustrated curator? The evidence is there, with his ongoing garish redesign of the White House, including his Goldfinger lair Oval Office (I demand someone show me where they’re spray-painting all this garbage on the White House lawn), the Rose Garden turned three-star hotel patio with DJ Donnie playlist amenities, and his newfound soon-to-be-moldy prez portrait lineup in the West Colonnade. Repressed curator or not, why is almost everyone seemingly going to sit back and let Destructo Don put his swelling, foundation-stained fingers into everything at the Smithsonian with little pushback other than a few obstinate historian groups shouting into the void?

For those who have been paying more attention to other recent Destructo Don antics, like forcing the Feds to takeover D.C. to wander around high-crime neighborhood, Georgetown, inching closer to pardoning sex trafficker and totally not a Mossad asset Ghislaine Maxwell, who laid it on a bit too thick, or attempting peace talks between Ukraine and Russia before throwing up his hands and forgetting about getting into heaven, Trump began his Smithsonian interference way back on March 27 with—what else?—an executive order. Though this did not reach the WWE-level crowd pleaser of his inaugural public executive order signing event with its ecstatic pen-tossing conclusion, Executive Order 14253 is no less significant as it laid the groundwork for Trump’s executive branch overreach art heist. Entitled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, this March executive order demanded an effort to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness—igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.” Which is a lot of words for, we want a recreation of 45 Wine and Whiskey in a museum.

Why is this necessary? Well, the administration was miffed at what it sees as a bastardization of history in favor of “the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” which “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Which…*cough* well. The executive order specifically calls out the still-open exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which I visited when in D.C. this April. The exhibition was pleasant if a tad staid, particularly when viewed after I revisited my favorite work in the American Art Museum like an old friend: James Hampton’s awe-inspiringly berserk, tinfoil mystic altar The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (If you touch Hampton’s work, Donnie, I swear…). Busts of Bronx residents by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres and Simone Leigh’s familiar stoneware heads, though, rattled the MAGA cages hard enough that Donnie tasked VP JD Vance, another frustrated art kid if his emo guyliner high school photos are any indication, and Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary Lindsey Halligan with making sure the Smithsonian is less critical race theory and more Thomas Kinkade.

About five months later, the White House poked its head out from hot-gluing Michael’s crap to the walls of the Oval Office and remembered its larger Smithsonian goals, beyond bullying the director of the National Portrait Gallery into resigning. This time, they sent a strongly worded letter on August 12 with a list of demands to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III. This time, though, JD Vance, who actually has power over the Smithsonian as a part of the Board of Regents (more on that later), was nowhere to be found, likely on another vacation, one of his eight within the months they’ve been in power (Now, before you accuse me of being another TDS-suffering shitlib, I didn’t like seeing Biden stagger around Rehoboth like a zombie while ignoring a genocide either). This letter was penned by Halligan, a former Florida insurance lawyer who transitioned to Trump’s defense team on the charges of squirreling away classified documents in a chandeliered Mar-a-Lago bathroom like a high-end episode of Hoarders. Though those art and historical bonafides alone would have sufficed, Halligan is joined on the letter by speechwriter and director of the Domestic Policy Council Vince Haley, a former Newt Gingrich stooge who associate produced Newt’s cheesy titled doc Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, an integral voice in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 who once said he wants to “traumatize” fed workers (cute).

What did this toxic trio want? Well, just about everything eight Smithsonian museums—National Museum of American History, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of the American Indian, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden—have done or will do from now until 2029. And I mean, everything. Though framed as anticipatory work for next year’s USA USA USA blowout 250^th anniversary, the letter wants not only plans for summer 2026, but all current and upcoming exhibition content, including traveling exhibitions, wall texts, educational materials, websites, grant applications, job descriptions, chain of command in artwork selection, the entire permanent collection, external partners…everything. Giving bullet-pointed demands for 30 days and 75-day deadlines, this trio of terror not only requested this info dump, but they also want “on-site observational visits, conducting walkthrough of current exhibitions to document themes, visitor experience, and visual messaging.” And a few months later, they’re also going to be doing “voluntary interviews with curators and senior staff.” Oh, boy! If all goes right, all their changes should be enacted by early 2026, which means we can look forward to a Lee Greenwood Bible show in the Spring!

If this museum ransom note doesn’t make your asshole clamp up, then let me explain. They’re going to wreak absolute havoc in those museums. It’s fucking over. It’s not about one show—or a few upcoming shows; it’s about the entire collection and how these museums operate. There’s no way a curator will be able to produce an exhibition freely without having Trump and co.’s Filet O’Fish breath panting down the back of their necks. Like Big Balls and the other DOGE children’s gleeful revoking of NIH and NSF grants, which has done generational damage to science advancement, this Smithsonian shit show is going to probably destroy these museums for at least a decade, if not more, even if Patrick Bateman…I mean…Gavin Newsom wins in 2028 (please god find someone else).

And for what? Well, according to Trump himself, they made slavery look too bad. In a Truth Social rant, the President spewed:

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the “HOTTEST” Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”

I’m glad I went to the Museum of African American History and Culture before the addition of framed AI slop images of people smiling through the Middle Passage or displays about how, like Ron DeSantis has continually asserted, slavery taught those lucky people a trade!

In contrast to Trump’s normal nonsensical blathering, the follow-up “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian” is more articulate, though that’s a low bar. It’s not that much less batshit. Combing through the list of twenty MAGA snowflake triggers, a few things stood out to me. First, most are copied and pasted directly from a recent article in The Federalist, which presented a gathering of Smithsonian exhibitions that bothered rat tourists who squealed to the mag. Besides imagery from actual shows bestowed by tattle-tales, most of the White House’s list deals with online exhibitions and articles, likely easily and quickly ChatGPT-ed by an intern. Because they focus on online content rather than walking a few blocks on the Mall, touching grass, and going to the museums, some of the major points relate to the not-yet-open National Museum of the American Latino. It’s hard to pearl clutch about a museum that doesn’t even exist. Of the IRL museums—a lot of the offense taken is not that surprising, such as hollering yet again about trans participants in women’s sports, stomping their feet about references to Ben Franklin owning slaves, rolling their eyes at the exhaustive description of LGBTQ identities, which amusingly includes “Friends of Dorothy,” or wailing about Angela Davis as “once among the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives.” Other points, though, feel like they lost steam in their right-wing outrage scavenger hunt, like rummaging through the American History Museum’s LGBTQ+ blog to take umbrage at 100-year-old Harlem drag balls and a post about queer skating that was published during the last Trump administration, or wagging their fingers at descriptions of the founding of America as “a profound unsettling of the continent” and the Pilgrims as “colonizers,” both of which are objectively true. They also get their panties in a twist about an American History Museum online exhibition that only displays protest materials from “leftist causes.” What do they expect, a vitrine holding QAnon Shaman’s horns?

Now, I won’t lie and pretend that I don’t find some of this stuff ridiculous. The most egregious is probably the now-deleted infographic “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States,” which frames, among other things, the nuclear family, objective, rational linear thinking, cause and effect, and a rigid time schedule as aspects of white culture internalized by Americans, including people of color. Not that it’s entirely wrong per se. Surely, there is something to be said for the continual oppressive drive to work yourself to the bone as the only celebrated way of being and having value in this society, rather than family or community or just enjoyment of life, as relating historically to colonizer-imposed WASPy bullshit. Yet, the imprecision with which this infographic uses “white culture” is way too associated with the kind of immediately alienating, identity politic pseudo-intellectualism of White Fragility and How to be an Antiracist that trades in being so vague that Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo can keep booking workshops and speaking gigs. I also rolled my eyes when I strolled right past the Anthony Fauci stop-motion animated tribute at the National Portrait Gallery, as if that narcissist needs more kudos in addition to finding time to pen a memoir during a pandemic. Both of these examples, though, speak to a very 2020-based psychosis that has now passed. Let’s all just agree to move on.

Other than the Fauci video, there are limited actual artworks here that rile up the White House. Mostly, replacing the Statue of Liberty with anyone remains a sore spot. In addition to the Immokalee Statue of Liberty, they’re also upset at Amy Sherald’s Trans Forming Liberty, a painting depicting trans model Arewà Basit as the Statue of Liberty. I’ll be honest, I like the Immokalee Statue of Liberty much more as it’s grounded in actual labor activism rather than the kind of blue-chip-adored, “Look! I replaced a white figure in a historical artwork with a marginalized person” neoliberalism that I find overdone. Yet, I also recognize that I’m cynical, and audiences would likely find more meaning in it than I do, which makes it depressing that Sherald recently yanked her show from the Smithsonian because, according to the artist, the National Portrait Gallery wanted to remove this exact painting out of fear of Donnie backlash, offering to replace it, instead, with a video of people reacting to the painting and trans issues (great). Other than insisting on the sanctity of Lady Liberty, the White House also dislikes paintings of migrants, whether they’re crossing Trump’s holey border wall in Rigoberto A. González’s Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas or, conversely, staring over the wall to watch a fireworks party on the American side. Perhaps most ironically, they also finger Ayana V. Jackson’s photographic exhibition From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya, which responds to techno duo Drexciya’s fictionalized underwater kingdom ruled by the children of pregnant women tossed overboard in the Middle Passage. If Trump wants more “positive” imagery related to slavery, this is actually how to do it —a reclamation of power, agency, and regal beauty in the midst of unspeakable horror and subjugation. The problem seems to be that these photographs were done by a Black woman.

All of which raises the question: What the hell is the Smithsonian going to look like in a year? Or in four? No more art by anyone but white dudes? Stuffed to the max with paintings like the newest White House Trump portrait, which appears to have been done by a mental patient smearing their shit as background? Not that I wouldn’t be morbidly tickled by that (and would surely make the Amtrak trek for a review), but the Smithsonian museums in D.C. are currently some of my favorite in the country. Mostly because they’re free and provide the accessibility and opportunity to just wander in and out of them on the Mall (and nearby) without wondering if they were really worth $30 (I’m looking at you, Guggenheim and Whitney) or stewing about how museums that take money from creeps that paid nine figures to Jeffrey Epstein should automatically be free (I’m looking at you, MoMA). They’re also warm and relaxing environments that don’t take on the sterile, stressful architecture of condos populated by crypto bros (I’m looking at you again, Whitney), and they also have some of the most perky elderly volunteers with whom I love engaging, even if I already know where I’m going. During my museum wanderings in April, it struck me that most of the shows I saw were by Black artists, including the phenomenal We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists at the Renwick. Well, that’s over, I told people, half-joking. Little did I know how right I would be.

There’s a lot to be said here for the similarities between Trump’s fixation on the Smithsonian and Hitler’s failed artist spite-a-thon regarding “degenerate art” in favor of his homoerotic Greco-Roman ideal. But the comparison is almost too obvious to spend time on. Not to mention, invoking Hitler’s name automatically makes most people’s brains, including mine, shut off. Rather than looking back, I want to look forward: What the fuck happens now? And I don’t just mean weak ass Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying, “The Smithsonian should continue holding the line” (whatever that means) on Sunday morning CNN talk shows. Is everyone just going to let Destructo Donnie run rampant?

Though the answer seems to be a resounding yes, it shouldn’t be this clear-cut. Other than Vance, the executive branch does not have unilateral power over the Smithsonian. Googling for this article and remembering that it was Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor who sparked the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in my Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek exhibition in 2010, I learned that since President Polk in 1846, the Smithsonian has been operated by a Board of Regents. This Board of Regents includes the Vice President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a smattering of Senators and Representatives, and a few citizen appointees. According to the list on Wikipedia, not only are the chair and vice chair currently both Democrats, but Democrats hold the majority of the board!! This includes Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who is instead posting this, and 80-year-old California Rep Doris Matsui. Where the hell are any of these people? Where is Roberts, who seems to be one of the most rational of the independent thinkers on the court? Don’t they want to at least reassert their power rather than ceding it to the executive branch without a peep, just like Congress did with Trump’s tit-for-tat tariffs? DORISSSS, WAKE UP!!!

Outside of the people with the actual ability to do something, where are other museums? Surely, they have to understand that even if the government has slightly less control over their finances, they’re next. And there’s no pleasing these people, so putting your head down, canceling shows just in case, and hoping for the best isn’t going to work. I’m not the only one wondering. “Will Museums Fight Back Against Trump?” asks The New York Times in a headline for an interview with their own cultural reporter, Robin Pogrebin. I’ll save you a free read: No. As Robin observes, “So far, no forceful counterweight to the Trump administration has emerged on the cultural landscape.” Why not? Surely, others remember as much as I do the weak attempts at #Resistance that proliferated in museums, galleries, and the art world throughout the first Trump administration. Sure, they were mostly cringe (remember Dear Ivanka?) and didn’t do shit, but at least it was something akin to an acknowledgement of a problem. And that was even before museums and art were threatened directly. What is the cause of the silence now? It’s worth noting that I don’t think the silence can be taken out of the context of the numerous cases of creeping censorship enacted by these “liberal” institutions of pro-Palestine artists and related art since 2023, paving the way for this larger clampdown. Deep down, these museums might know it too.

And other than hard news reporting of these letters and lists, where is the outrage from prominent art critics and writers? I’m not going to say there isn’t any. Alex Greenberger wrote an editorial in ArtNews, and Hyperallergic has been on the case more than anyone. But, where are the edgelord art critics like Dean Kissick, lauded for bitching about the influx of identity politics curation in Harper’s about a few years too late, just in time for the id-pol pendulum swing to make it look like he helped usher in an authoritarian crackdown? Do they have nothing to say? Is this what they wanted, in addition to doing panels with the Red Scare girls? Or what about ArtForum? Is watching and blankly reporting on the ruin of some of the best museums we have, one of their “various constraints”? Or where is endless anti-Trump boomer poster Jerry Saltz, other than defending dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the most egregious example of boomer brainbleed I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing? And what about Cultured Mag’s Critics’ Table that seems to think of itself as the bastion of criticism in 2025? It’s not worth covering, I guess? No big deal!

Look. I’m not an idiot. I don’t think, other than the Board of Regents reclaiming their actual power, speaking out forcefully would do much of anything to stop the Trump garbage truck from rolling in. But the lack of response makes it look like—and maybe it’s more than look like—the Smithsonian takeover is just fine. In that case, well, I’ll see you at the opening of the Jon McNaughton retrospective in 2026!