Trump’s Campaign to Defund the Arts—and Rewrite History

October is National Arts n Humanities Month, a time normally reserved for celebrating the creative and intellectual currents that enrich our nation. But this year, the month began not with a celebration, but with a shutdown, the latest and most jarring blow in the Trump Administration’s long-running war against American culture. In August 2017, I and 15 of my colleagues on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made a not so difficult choice. In the wake of President Trump’s shocking refusal to unequivocally condemn the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, we resigned. We wrote to the president that his support for hate groups and the false equivalencies he pushed could not stand. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” our letter stated. “Your values are not American values.” We took that step because to remain silent would have made us complicit in his hateful rhetoric. We warned that his pattern of attacking art, the humanities, and the free press was pushing our country “further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.” We feared what was to come. We were not wrong. What we witnessed then was a preview. What America is experiencing now is the feature presentation, a systematic, full-frontal assault on our nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This deliberate strategy is outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” and is designed to replace our diverse culture with a single, government-approved ideology. The first wave of this assault is a strategy of erasure through fiscal starvation. The administration has moved to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—the very backbone of our nation’s cultural infrastructure. Active grants have been cruelly rescinded, leaving community theaters, local museums, facing sudden funding gaps and uncertainty over expenses for work already underway. Now, with the government shutdown that began on October 1, this long-threatened starvation has become reality, forcing the closure of national museums and halting federal grant payments to cultural groups nationwide. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a lifeline for independent journalism and educational programming, especially in rural America, is being systematically dismantled. The second, more insidious wave is a strategy of institutional capture. The president has installed himself as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, purging its bipartisan board, replacing it with political loyalists. And last month he dissolved its entire Social Impact division. The president now boasts of his personal involvement in selecting honorees, rejecting those deemed “too woke” or “too liberal.” The Kennedy Center is being transformed from a national stage for artistic excellence into a political trophy.  In an even more stunning move, on the very day the government shut down, the White House fired 22 of the 26 members of the National Council on the Humanities, the expert body that advises the NEH, leaving it without the quorum required to conduct business and clearing the path for politically motivated grant-making.   At the same time, the Trump Administration has declared war on our nation’s memory. Under the Orwellian banner of an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History,” the White House has launched a comprehensive review of the Smithsonian Institution. Its stated goal is to purge our national museums of “divisive” or “ideologically driven language”—code for any historical analysis that critically examines issues of race or injustice. The chilling effect is already palpable: in an act of protest, the acclaimed artist Amy Sherald recently canceled her upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, citing censorship concerns.  The president himself has complained that our museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.” Far from restoring sanity, these actions constitute a state-mandated campaign of historical revisionism prompting the American Alliance of Museums to issue a statement on the “growing threats of censorship.”   This sustained attack on our cultural institutions creates the conditions for overt acts of censorship. The campaign to defund the arts, capture our museums, and rewrite our history is a prelude to silencing dissent itself. By systematically undermining the very fields that cultivate critical thinking and historical consciousness, the Trump Administration could create a populace less able to recognize the foundational principles of a free society when they come under direct assault. This is not a uniquely American tragedy. It is the authoritarian playbook, page for page. When a government dictates what art is acceptable, we hear the echoes of Nazi Germany’s “Degenerate Art” exhibitions and the Soviet Union’s doctrine of “Socialist Realism.” When a leader seizes control of cultural institutions to enforce ideological conformity, we see a direct parallel to the tactics of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Authoritarians always target art first. They do so, because art and history are enemies of the myths a regime needs to survive. They foster critical thought and reveal uncomfortable truths that undermine nationalist propaganda. By silencing artists and historians, a regime seeks to control not just the present, but the past and the future as well. In 2017, we resigned because our conscience demanded it. Today, as a government shutdown darkens our national museums and the National Endowment for the Humanities is gutted, the danger is no longer a matter of rhetoric but of radical, systemic action. This assault threatens our ability to think critically, remember our past honestly, and imagine a future that is not dictated by the state. This is a battle for the American soul, and for the sake of the freedoms, it is a battle we must not lose.