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Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights

It seemed like an ordinary Friday. Until, that is, an anxious colleague came in to tell Sajet that the president of the United States had personally denounced her on social media. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social. According to the post, Sajet was “a highly partisan person” and a “strong supporter” of diversity and inclusion programmes, which by an executive order on his inauguration day, 20 January, he had eradicated from federal agencies. “Her replacement will be named shortly,” continued the message. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
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Sajet kept off social media, avoiding the threatening messages from Trump’s base that friends told her were amassing. She lasted until Thursday 12 June. In the end, she decided she should try to defuse what she feared could turn into a larger, more resolute attack on the museum. “It just became fairly obvious that the story wasn’t going to change,” she told me. “So I thought, ‘I’m just going to take control of this, and step outside of the maelstrom.’”

In short, the president had ended up getting what he wanted – without a jot of authority to do so. As for Sajet’s supposed partisan position, her adherence to the loathed ideology of diversity and inclusion? Sajet’s mission had been, she told me, to ensure that Americans would be able to see portraits of people like themselves. Gradually, she made sure more women, more minorities, more Black people were represented on its walls. “It was just recognising that people had been knocked out of the national story, so let’s put them back in,” she said. “It wasn’t terribly revolutionary.”