King Donald I of America
A dictator and fascist like Trump needs stupid people to adore him. That’s why museum funding and programming in the United States have experienced an unprecedented assault in the first 100 days of Trump’s term. National museums got caught up in his hunt against programs to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion and access programs (DEIA), he called « illegal and immoral » in an executive order. Both the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Institution, a nationwide network of museums, eliminated their DEIA offices within a week.
In an Artnet-interview Laura Lott, a former president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, made the reason for Trump’s behavior clear: « An educated, free-thinking, debating public is a threat to the power of this administration. They don’t want the public to understand facts and think too critically,” she said. “Rather, they’d like us to just accept the policies they’re selling without question or compromise.” In other words: Trump needs stupid uneducated Americans to follow him loyally wherever his wrong path and irresponsible actions may lead.
Responsible in the arts and culture sector are horrified. « There is no precedent for the moment we are in,” said Marilyn Jackson, president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums in the Artnet article. « It feels like an assault and I think we can fairly describe it as a culture war,” said Anne Ellegood, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
“This administration has declared war on the nonprofit sector,” said philanthropy consultant Melissa Cowley Wolf. “It’s a lot to keep up with and it’s continuously devastating if you care about the work of civil society.”
Other people say that Trump’s assault on civic institutions is so profound and so structural that they won’t recover very quickly.
Yet, many leading figures in the arts sector just remain silent. They are scared of speaking up, in order not to fall into the grinder of the fascist.
The victims are clearly underserved and most vulnerable communities who were to be helped with DEI programs. Shows devoted to Black artists, LGBTQ artists, museums education programs for children, for people with visual impairments, the Deaf community, programs for people with special needs, including cancer survivors, domestic abuse survivors are cancelled. So, all the programs focusing on experiences of non-white and unhealthy people are a particular target for Trump. You see the path and find similarities in the Nazi policies in Germany…
But the fascist does not stop there. One of his latest executive orders, aimed at eliminating so-called “divisive” and “anti-American” content from the Smithsonian Institution, exemplifying a broad effort to manipulate the cultural fabric and rewrite the history of the U.S.
Democratic politician Dina Titus says in an article of The Hill: « The broader campaign to rewrite our history has permeated every cultural touchstone of the nation. At the Smithsonian, exhibits that confront the realities of slavery and systemic racism, particularly at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, are reportedly being targeted as content deemed too ‘divisive.’ (…) Today’s cultural purge is unfolding against the backdrop of America’s upcoming 250th anniversary which Trump will use as a pretext for a sanitized retelling of the past. »
