The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have been remarkably eventful across multiple fronts, particularly in culture and education. In his early months in office, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his capacity to seize the moment, consolidating power through an aggressive spate of executive orders and by putting pressure on American institutions.
While executive orders cannot override foundational constitutional principles such as freedom of speech and expression, U.S. cultural and academic organizations are under threat—not only from proposed funding cuts but also the looming specter of programming restrictions and escalated government oversight. This pressure is especially acute for D.C.-based institutions, which are more immediately exposed to White House influence.
The most recent flashpoint is the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which has canceled the multi-day Tapestry of Pride program and other scheduled events for Pride Month following Trump’s self-appointment as chairman of the institution. Roma Daravi, the center’s vice president of public relations who previously served as White House Deputy Director of Strategic Communications under Trump, asserted in a statement on X that the “only shows under the Kennedy Center programming umbrella that we have canceled since February 12th were due to lack of sales or artist availability.” Yet the timing and political context of Trump’s involvement suggest something more deliberate.
A March executive order targeted the Smithsonian’s network of twenty-one museums under the banner of “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History“—a directive aimed at purging so-called “improper ideology.” The language of the order echoes, with disturbing proximity, the rhetorical framework of authoritarian regimes, and it calls out specific exhibitions as “divisive” and “corrosive,” including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” show.
The individuals tapped to implement the ideological audit include Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and a far more unlikely figure: Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer whose meteoric rise culminated in a newly minted role as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary. Her most notable professional achievement prior to becoming Trump’s lawyer seems to be a 2019 case in which she successfully contested a $500,000 roof leak claim in Broward County.
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Trump has made it clear he’s looking to assert control over how the Smithsonian narrates American history and to counter a curatorial approach that, in recent years, has begun to reflect the nation’s multicultural identity and acknowledge the enduring legacies of inequality and injustice. “Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the order declares, voicing concerns that the Smithsonian has fallen “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” This shift, it continues, has not only deepened societal rifts but also advanced interpretations “that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Within art circles, some had begun to question whether the institutional embrace of “identity politics” might, in its effort to address exclusion, inadvertently risk entrenching new forms of division. Still, the most troubling aspect of the executive order is not the critique itself, but the attempt to enforce a singular, monolithic vision of what is, by nature, a plural and evolving history. In doing so, the administration threatens both the autonomy of the Smithsonian as a public cultural institution and the foundational constitutional protections of free speech and expression.
A mandated narrowing of perspectives in American art
The termination of all DEI programs—one of Trump’s earliest acts—was a similarly calculated rollback of the gains made in recent decades toward more representative cultural institutions. While the DEI order applies formally to government-funded bodies, and private entities like the Metropolitan Museum of Art have maintained they are exempt, the ideological thrust behind the measure casts a longer shadow. The deeper concern lies in the narrative it supports—one that shores up the mythos of a purified national identity aligned with Trump’s revived ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra, while leaving conspicuously unanswered the question: great for whom?
At the symbolic core of this ideological reinforcement stands the proposed National Garden of American Heroes—a sculpture park conceived to canonize a selective vision of American history ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. Funded by redirecting resources from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the initiative has been framed as a patriotic corrective. Meanwhile, the NEH has been gutted, forced to lay off 65 percent of its staff and cancel more than 1,200 cultural project grants nationwide. March saw the administration push for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the only federal agency explicitly charged with supporting the nation’s museums and libraries. And in April, the art and preservation unit of the General Services Administration, which manages more than 26,000 publicly owned artworks, was similarly dismantled, leaving the future of those works uncertain and unprotected.
Early indications of Trump’s cultural agenda were already evident in his aesthetic mandates—most notably, his order requiring the use of “classical architecture” for new federal buildings. This directive alarmingly echoed the architecturally focused rhetoric of Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom advocated a return to Classical styles as a visual assertion of authoritarian grandeur. “We build in order to fortify our authority,” Hitler once proclaimed. Trump’s reinstatement of the 2020 memorandum “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” similarly instructed that federal buildings should adhere to a “classical style” that “commands public admiration”—a stylistic preference cloaked in nostalgia, but fraught with political implications.
Academic autonomy is also under fire
The wave of federal rollbacks has also extended sharply into education and academic research. Universities and scientific institutions across the U.S. have been struck by successive rounds of funding cuts, prompting the formation of a coalition by leaders from the nation’s top universities. The group’s stated aim is to resist what it describes as a sustained campaign against academic freedom and research autonomy under the Trump administration.
Central to this collective’s mission is the defense of institutional control over curricula, programming, admissions and hiring practices—especially as they pertain to international students. A petition circulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and signed by more than 500 higher education leaders across the country has already condemned what it calls “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American colleges and universities.”
Even Harvard University—among the country’s most prominent academic institutions—has reportedly faced threats to its ability to enroll international students and hire international faculty following the administration’s decision to cut off funding for its DEI programs. Cornell and Northwestern have experienced multibillion-dollar freezes in federal support, while Columbia University has been hit with a $400 million funding reduction, ostensibly in response to allegations of antisemitism on campus. Artnews reported that at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), a professor was terminated after assisting with a student-led exhibition that took a pro-Palestine stance.
And at the end of March, we saw one of the administration’s most dramatic moves yet: the dissolution of the Department of Education via executive order, framed as a final step in restoring state control over American schooling under the guise of improving quality—effectively dismantling federal oversight of the nation’s education system.
