The Art Of The D***: Trump Is Trying To Censor The Smithsonian And Everyone Hates It

President Donald Trump is threatening to censor Smithsonian exhibits about race, gender and American history that he doesn't like, a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook.WASHINGTON ― “Bullcrap.”That’s what Howard, a retiree visiting the National Portrait Gallery, had to say when I told him about the art show that had just been withdrawn from exhibition there. He was sitting on a bench in the museum when I asked if he’d heard about it. He hadn’t. The more I told him about what happened, the more he just kept repeating, “Bullcrap.”A day earlier, Amy Sherald, the artist behind the famous 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, cancelled a solo show scheduled for September because, she said, the gallery told her she may have to remove a painting that could anger President Donald Trump. In a statement, the gallery said it “could not come to an agreement” with Sherald on how to present her show.The painting, titled Trans Forming Liberty, features a Black, transgender woman posing as the Statue of Liberty. It’s precisely the kind of image that makes Trump squirm ― and that he’s been bullying the Smithsonian to keep out of its museums across Washington, DC. In a March executive order, Trump threatened to cut federal funding to the Smithsonian Institution, which encompasses 17 free DC-area museums and the national zoo, over exhibits that “divide Americans based on race” or “recognise men as women in any respect.”Howard, who was in town from Aurora, Colorado, said he didn’t know about Trump’s efforts to censor exhibits throughout the Smithsonian as he walked around the Portrait Gallery on this afternoon in late July. He didn’t like it at all.“More bullcrap,” he grumbled. “We are adults. We don’t need to be treated like children.”Like everyone interviewed for this story, Howard requested to be identified only by his first name — he suggested the pseudonym “Wiseass” would also work — to preserve his anonymity. His family was sitting nearby when I asked for his thoughts on the cancelled exhibit. His wife, Andrea, moved in closer to hear about it, as did another woman waiting for a tour, Marcy.“I certainly don’t like anybody telling me what I should and shouldn’t be looking at,” Andrea said. “On top of all of that, it’s also just like, trans people are not worth being in big museums like this? They should be represented.”“I think it’s important that [the artist is] taking ownership,” said Marcy, who was visiting from Dallas. “She’s saying, ‘If you aren’t going to show my entire collection, then I have the right to take ownership and not show it.’”Trump’s executive order, which directs Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian exhibits and programs, claims that censorship is necessary to stop the “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” But his definition of “divisive narratives” seems to be anything that talks about gender or race.The executive order names specific exhibits Trump wants altered or gone: The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, which looks at how the US has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement,” and an unspecified upcoming exhibit that he claims celebrates “the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.”Asked for comment about Trump trying to erase art exhibits and history he doesn’t like, Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, took issue with the question itself.“The premise of your question to comment on ‘Trump trying to rewrite history or erase people in exhibits at the Smithsonian’ is deeply hypocritical,” Halligan said in a statement. “This administration stands for the preservation of American history without ideological distortion.”Incredibly, she accused the artist behind Trans Forming Liberty of trying to censor history.“There is one Statue of Liberty, a globally recognised symbol of freedom and unity that stands for all Americans, without the need to recast it through the lens of identity politics,” Halligan said. “Reimagining the Statue of Liberty with a politically charged reinterpretation does not preserve history ― it rewrites it. If anyone is attempting to erase or distort history here, it’s the artist.”A spokesperson for the Portrait Gallery did not respond to a request for comment.Artist Amy Sherald cancelled an upcoming show at the National Portrait Gallery because, she said, the gallery told her she may have to remove this painting, "Trans Forming Liberty," to appease Trump.I spent a couple of days talking to tourists visiting four different Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC, asking what they made of Trump’s efforts to censor exhibits relating to race and gender. Many were retirees, but some were younger families with kids running around. Some voted for Trump. Some didn’t. Some wouldn’t say. But of the 15 or so people I spoke to, none said they agreed that Trump should be erasing or changing any art in museums.“Art is not meant to be censored,” insisted Jennifer, a tourist from Los Angeles who was grabbing a bite to eat in the American Art Museum with her sister and an old friend.“I mean, art is meant to challenge us. Art is meant to challenge your thinking, challenge your ideas,” she said. “If it doesn’t challenge you, what’s the point?”Jennifer said she’s worked in museum education, and to her, it’s important for people to view art that makes them uncomfortable. She gave the example of a painting she had just seen in the American Art Museum, Bar in Hotel Scribe, which features a Nazi flag on display in a café, and noted she is Jewish.“I was like, ‘interesting.’ But I wouldn’t expect that to be pulled because it offended me,” said Jennifer. “I don’t expect art to be comfortable.”Asked why she thinks Trump is trying to keep people from viewing art he doesn’t like, Jennifer, who made it clear she did not vote for him, said she’s “not surprised by anything he does.”“But I don’t like that the Smithsonian, as an art institution, is caving in fear,” she said.Trump hasn’t just been threatening museums to bend to his will. He’s been abusing his executive power to try to punish major law firms that he perceives as his political enemies, and promising to sue prominent universities if they don’t accept his conditions for running their schools. Time and again, these institutions ― we see you, Paul Weiss and Brown University ― have chosen cowardice over standing up for the law or their own values.Trump’s efforts to stifle the Smithsonian are already having an unsettling effect on some of the people who work there. I asked Portrait Gallery workers for their thoughts on Sherald pulling her entire exhibit rather than censoring it for Trump, but they wouldn’t talk, even anonymously.One worker began nodding immediately as I asked my question, suggesting they already knew what I was going to ask. “I can’t really talk about that from here,” they said, through a long and awkward grin. A second worker said several times they weren’t allowed to talk about this, but then, curiously, lingered after I thought our exchange was over.Behind a big smile with clenched teeth, they quietly shared some thoughts on the controversy over the Trans Forming Liberty painting. They noted that there were other controversial works on display in the museum, some with dark context, that remained unchallenged. “What’s the difference?” they said softly.They called it “scary” that Trump is trying to erase portrayals of transgender people in art, but emphasised it’s just one of many scary things being carried out by the Trump administration. Asked what they meant, they brought up how “scary” it is that people are being erased — literally — in Gaza as the Israeli government, backed by the Trump administration, carries out a genocide against Palestinians.With a weak laugh, this worker also noted “the irony” of not being able to speak freely in response to questions about censorship.Here is "Trans Forming Liberty" on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Look, nothing terrible is happening because people can see it!A hallmark of authoritarian governments is using censorship to control information through the media and the arts, suppress dissent and enforce their political agenda through fear of retaliation. Some civil rights groups were quick to point out parallels to Trump’s March executive order targeting transgender people in art and in history.“This is what fascism looks like,” Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement at the time.Trump has long fashioned himself as a wannabe strongman, fawning over autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, who have kept their grip on power in part by quashing artists’ free expression and suppressing perspectives different from their own. They rely on censorship to create a facade that their oppressive views have strong public support.Dr. Karrie Koesel, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on authoritarianism, said censoring the arts or artistic communities “is definitely a well-worn strategy” employed by authoritarian governments.“This is in part because art is a medium that resonates,” Koesel said. “It’s critical. It’s geared toward social commentary. It also, in some cases, represents an intellectual class, which is a target of the current administration. There’s some anti-intellectualism, anti-higher education for sure.”She said what’s particularly “chilling” about authoritarianism is when museums or artists feel pressured into self-censoring to align with the political interests of those in power. She couldn’t say whether the Smithsonian has been doing this, and she emphasised that the United States isn’t anywhere near the point where the government controls production of the arts, which the Soviet Union did, for example, by exclusively promoting art, music or literature that advanced the ideological interests of the regime.But that doesn’t mean that Trump’s threats of censorship at the Smithsonian won’t have a disquieting effect.“You don’t need a directive from the White House to see broader downstream effects within artistic communities and cultural spaces,” Koesel said.The Portrait Gallery isn’t the only Smithsonian museum that appears to be altering exhibits to appease Trump. The National Museum of American History last month removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from a display about impeached presidents. The Smithsonian reportedly made the change amid pressure from the White House to get rid of an art museum director, per The Washington Post. The Smithsonian later said in a statement that “a future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments.” Curiously, the online companion to this exhibit includes documents and photos related to the three other presidents who were impeached (or effectively impeached, as Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached), but for Trump, it just mentions his name. Once.Meanwhile, the National Museum of African American History and Culture came under fire in April after it returned civil rights-related artifacts to owners who had not requested them back. Civil rights activist Rev. Amos Brown said the museum notified him it was returning two books he’d loaned it in 2016: a Bible he took to demonstrations with Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, and an 1880 book considered the “first history of the Negro race.”Brown told NBC4 Washington that the museum had previously given him the option to donate his books permanently or renew his loan, but not this time. He called it “downright dishonest” and “demeaning” to suggest he wanted his historic books back. The museum has said any claims that it wasn’t following standard loan agreements are “false.”Monica was at the African American History Museum last week, visiting with her family from Oklahoma. A Black woman and mom to three, she said she had just been talking to her sons, ages 9 and 12, about the museum’s exhibit about the painful history of slavery, “Slavery and Freedom.”“There’s always some random quote from some person that’s like, ‘Well, you know, slavery wasn’t that bad. They took care of their slaves, they gave them food and shelter.’ Stuff like that,” Monica said. “So I’m telling my boys, ‘This is the truth. This is the reality of it.’”Asked what she makes of Trump criticising Smithsonian exhibits about race, she said she thinks it’s a combination of him “pandering to his base” and his own fears.“People are afraid of change. People are afraid of truth,” Monica said. “Truth is what it is. Facts can change. Truth does not. So, people are afraid of the truth, and they are afraid when they see what the truth shows them about themselves.”She emphasised she is “a very conservative person,” but that that’s never meant that she gets to decide how other people live their lives or what beliefs they should have.“It is bullying,” Monica said of Trump threatening the Smithsonian. “I’m settled in my convictions. If we’re talking about politics, if we’re talking about faith, there are certain things that I believe. Your beliefs are different? It’s not gonna change mine. It’s not going to hurt mine.”Across the street, Paul and Tracy were checking out the National Museum of the American Indian. They were on a week-long road trip from their home in northern Colorado, with plans to check out several of the Smithsonian’s museums, most of which they’d never seen. Both were retirees, and both shared that they voted for Trump in November.“He’s helped and done a lot of good work, but you never hear any of that stuff,” Tracy said. “Shutting the border down was a big deal for me. You can’t go to any other country and just cross in and be given all kinds of stuff like they do here.”Paul similarly defended Trump’s record, in between sharing warnings that America is in the Biblical End Times and conspiracies about 94-year-old billionaire philanthropist George Soros wanting to put chips in people’s brains to control them.Neither liked hearing about Trump’s threats to censor Smithsonian exhibits, though.“I think all the history should remain, you know?” said Tracy. “All of it. I mean, we’re not the only country where bad stuff’s been going on. It’s all over the world. So what? It’s history. We learn from history. So that’s how I feel.”“Yeah, they shouldn’t change history,” added Paul. “They shouldn’t make it something it wasn’t.”The National Museum of American History removed Trump's name from an exhibit, "American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith," about presidents who have been impeached. The museum later said it's just in the process of updating the exhibit. Hmm.Trump hasn’t specifically taken aim, yet, at the Hirshhorn Museum, which features modern art exhibits and will soon include one by the famously anonymous street artist Banksy, known for his anti-authoritarian political works. Craig and Fiona were visiting this museum last week, taking a break from the sweltering summer heat at the museum’s indoor cafe. They were tourists from Edinburgh, Scotland.They just laughed when I asked what they made of Trump’s threats of censorship.“Completely ridiculous,” said Craig. “You’ve got to understand that from abroad, from the UK, most of Europe, Trump is a bit of a clown. A cartoon character. So trying to censor, you know, things like art or what you see in a gallery is absolutely ridiculous. And not his remit. At all.”They said if the First Minister of Scotland, their country’s top elected leader, were to try to censor exhibits like Trump is doing, there would be widespread outcry.“Massive unrest,” said Fiona.“People would be on the streets protesting,” added Craig. “And they’d, you know, double down, put even more of that type of art on display.”They said they were confused why this wasn’t happening in the United States.“You know his game,” Craig said. “Trump comes out with all the bluster, and then he sort of backs off and you end up with something less. It’s a show.”“It’s a reality show of the president.”

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