In his quest for cultural dominance, Trump threatens what makes America great
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Before members of Congress vote on the budget package that President Trump is about to send them, they might consider watching the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,” which recently concluded on PBS’ Masterpiece.
In the final episodes, Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), pissed (per usual) that things are not going his way, orders the execution of his right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance). Henry will come to regret it, of course, but he is an impetuous and paranoid narcissist, with little sense of history and even less vision.
Cromwell’s journey to Tower Hill is, in its way, poetic justice. After all, he helped Henry grow the powers of the monarchy, making him head of the Church of England as well as the kingdom, and did not object to using the chopping block to do it.
Now PBS, famous for reminding us, through documentaries and series like “Wolf Hall,” of the historic pitfalls of power, is facing the axe. Trump has ordered that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies stop public financing for PBS and NPR.
Trump has put many things on his chopping block of late, including our system of checks and balances, civil rights, the economy and far too many cultural touchstones. Like Henry VIII and many emperors, he wants not just political power but cultural dominance.
President Trump declared the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI” as he announced her firing on Truth Social.
Just as the increasingly Rococo White House reflects Trump’s Versailles-knockoff style, his ghastly “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order is a disingenuous and authoritarian mandate to remake not just American history but also our arts and letters, sports and media into an endless reflection of his ideological image.
In addition to cutting funds for PBS and NPR, Trump has, via executive order, threatened to defund elite universities, including Harvard, that refuse to take government dictation over curriculum and hiring policies. In his rampage to root out “wokeness,” he has dismantled Voice of America (the country’s largest and oldest international broadcaster), personally taken over programming at the Kennedy Center and obliterated the curatorial autonomy of the Smithsonian (on Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, which he may or may not be legally able to do, claiming that she was too “partisan”).
In order to ensure that a single trans athlete was unable to compete unimpeded in a high school track event, he threatened to withhold federal funds from California (which contributes more than 12% of those funds, making it the largest donor state in the country).
Under Elon Musk, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (a name George Orwell could have coined), has defunded, among other things, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institutes of Health and the National Park Service.
Trump recently suggested that Alcatraz be turned back to a working prison, which, given his draconian immigration policies, forces one to wonder how soon before he decides to replace the Statue of Liberty’s torch with a “do not enter” sign or destroy Lady Liberty altogether as the Nazis did during their fictional takeover of the U.S. in “The Man in the High Castle”?
Many of the institutions that Trump now threatens to curtail or destroy have made this country a democratic haven and cultural center for decades. They have looked on the tempests of war, economic turmoil, civil unrest and seesawing politics and remained, as Shakespeare said, an ever-fixed mark, adapting to atmospheric shifts but essentially unchanged.
The suit claims the White House’s attempts to cut off federal funding violates the 1st Amendment. NPR recently filed a similar suit.
Not surprisingly, some of the proposed cuts are being challenged in court by PBS, NPR, Harvard and other besieged institutions. ABC reported in March that the Trump administration had been sued three times for every business day of his presidency.
As many have pointed out, his plan to Make America Great Again involves destroying many of the things that made it great in the first place.
Which may explain, in part, his consistently poor showing in popularity polls.
To be fair, Trump has never been explicit about the antecedent Again. But over the years, he has pointed to the economic boom at the turn of the 20th century and again in the years following World War II as times when the United States was, by his lights, truly great.
Many believe that Trump actually hopes to return to the relatively brief Gilded Age, the years between 1870 and 1890 during which captains of industry/robber barons flourished, aided in large part by the expansion of the railroads (at the hands, it must be noted, of Chinese and Irish immigrants).
But the actual turn of the century saw the rise of the Progressive Era during which the robber barons turned to philanthropy, funding medical research, libraries, museums and universities; unions and the women’s suffrage movement triumphed; and President Theodore Roosevelt enacted his Square Deal, breaking up trusts, avoiding tariffs, protecting consumers and establishing the national parks.
In the early 1900s, journalism, the muckrakers, became highly influential, raising awareness about many social ills, including child labor, unsafe working conditions and unsanitary food processing.
The lawsuit in federal court says President Trump’s May 1 executive order targets NPR and PBS for its programming choices, making it unconstitutional.
Likewise, during the economic expansion post-WWII, American politics were dominated by liberal Democrats still operating within the ethos of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the GI Bill by which a generation of Americans attended college. At Harvard, where enrollment nearly doubled, almost half of the class of 1949 was WWII veterans.
So it’s odd, to say the least, that Trump would choose to trumpet these particular eras as the benchmarks to which he hopes our country will return even as he attempts to destroy many of the institutions that have their roots in those times.
Voice of America was founded during WWII to counter Axis propaganda and continued to bring cultural and political democracy to countries under authoritarian rule. It was so effective that Putin tried to block it. Trump is now shutting it down and plans to advance the pro-Trump One America News Network.
The Smithsonian has engaged with many presidents since its establishment in 1846 (the vice president always serves on the Board of Regents), especially both of the Roosevelts. But no one but Trump ever attempted to strip the museum of its independent curatorial process by dictating what should and should not be featured in its many museums.
Three Senate Democrats warned that any payment to Trump to gain favorable treatment by regulators could violate federal anti-bribery laws. Paramount’s dealings with Trump ‘raises serious concerns of corruption and improper conduct,’ they said.
PBS, NPR and the Kennedy Center are more recent additions, but their aims and presence grow naturally from the kind of federal funding for arts and media prevalent during the Progressive Era and following WWII, when presidential administrations, of both parties, agreed with the founding fathers’ belief that democracy requires an informed electorate and Americans are entitled to free expression.
Like the Constitution, our iconic cultural institutions can grow to reflect the country they serve, but also like the Constitution, they cannot be threatened or eviscerated at the whim of the president.
As they prepare to receive Trump’s budget cuts, some Republican members of Congress have already expressed uneasiness over the proposed gutting of PBS. That queasiness should be taken as the symptom of a larger problem — a president should certainly be able to influence American culture, but he cannot be allowed to dismantle it.
As they consider their vote, our elected officials might want to reacquaint themselves with the actual history of American greatness. And then they should have a look at “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.”
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