Donald Trump’s Irrefutable Agenda: Cleansing Culture, Erasing Memories, Destroying America

IT happened before many current United States citizens were even born. For those of us who were around, however, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas--one nearly 190 feet tall, the other at least 124 feet in height—was breathtaking and remains unforgettable.

Together, the sculptures had been a peaceful and powerful presence, resting against the mountains of Afghanistan since 600 CE. They were testaments to the life and culture of monks and others, many of whom lived in nearby monasteries and sanctuaries that once dominated the region along what was called the Silk Road--a major trade route between China and the western world.

On March 2, 2001, to announce their arrival and establish their control, Taliban leaders and some of followers decided the Buddhas were an affront to their Muslim religion and sentiments.  Consequently,  during the next 25 days, the Buddhas endured an unprecedented assault, despite international intervention. They were finally destroyed, leaving vacant alcoves that served as evidence of  inexplicable cultural violence.

I thought of the Buddhas at various moments in 2025, as we, in America, endured a similar relentless and merciless strike perpetrated by Donald Trump, the 47^th president of the United States. Using a flurry of executive orders that, in truth, lacked legal authority, he systematically, with vengeance and venom, assaulted American cultural, historical and humanities institutions: the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, The National Archives, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio and the Library of Congress, among others.

The East Wing of the White House was crumbled in a day. Decades of history and rituals were carried off to a trash heap miles away. Before that, the walls of the Oval Office were assailed by gaudy gold decorations and framing, in praise undoubtedly to the Gilded Age. That period of millionaire, robber-baron dominance apparently aligns with Trumps vision of America--now and forever.

As with the battering of the Buddhas, Trump’s storming of cultural institutions has raised international alarm. However, the Republican Party has been loath to provide any protection. In fact, leaders have aided the strikes: Mike Johnson, speaker of the U.S. House of Representative held his chamber in recess for weeks while refusing to swear in a new Democratic member principally to prevent passage of legislation that mandated the public release of files and other documents related to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The entire Epstein episode is a pure and unmitigated beating of family—the bulwark of American society. Republicans may say they believe in God and family but, in reality, they are engaged in massive disruption of institutions that cradle children, women and community.

Is there any wonder why young adults are not interested in getting married, having children, purchasing their own home or engaging in civic and political activities?

Trump has created a universal disdain for politics. He has been allowed to violate the constitution and to bludgeon democracy. On multiple occasions this year, he has returned to the scenes of his crimes, re-opening wounds and inflicting pain with impunity.

Consider that he first began pummeling the Kennedy Memorial Center only a few weeks after being sworn into his second, nonconsecutive term. He replaced a high profile, highly competent, hardworking Board of Trustees with a gang of nobodies and wannabes willing to ask how high, when he commanded them to jump. Unsurprisingly, that board soon named him chair. When the annual Honors Award program was presented, Trump—a man who admitted that prior to those changes he had never attended any event at the Center—was selected to serve as the master of ceremonies, casting a cheap and political patina over the entire affair.

Trump and his marauders circled back on Thursday, December 19, 2025. The board of sycophants, voted to rename the Center, knowing that action could be considered legal only if undertaken by the U.S. Congress. However, given that Republican congressional leaders, including Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, had ceded all authority to the president, no one feared an undoing.

Within hours of their vote, Trump’s name and been drilled into the side of the building constructed as a living memorial for John F. Kennedy, the 35^th president of the United States whose life had been taken from him by an assassin. The term “memorial” must have been foreign to the new board.

As Jamie Bonkiewicz noted on X “If you want your name on a memorial, you should have the decency to die first.”

What Republican in Congress will demand the removal of Trump’s name?

Across the country and around the globe, the response has been resoundingly negative, however. Members of the Kennedy family voiced outrage. Citizens from Washington, DC and the metropolitan region staged a protest outside the facility.

I was not on the plaza that day, but I am enraged.

I still recall learning as a child that President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas, Texas. My classmates and I were inconsolable. At home, my great grandmother tried as best she could to ease my grief and my growing anxiety about whether Colored people, like us, would be safe in a society where there were people who hated the leader of our country as much as they did us.

Decades later, I moved to Washington, DC; the Center had already been established. Just as I turned 30 years old and was beginning my career in the arts, Carole Huggins, director of Programs for Children and Youth, hired me as a consultant to help plan and produce a Black History Month celebration for local elementary schools. Later, I designed and coordinated the Cultural Diversity Festival, examining the commonalities between African American, Asian and Latino cultures; one year, my children’s play, Collage, was presented at the monthlong event.

I worked there for three years; Carole and I became lifelong friends. She and others I met at the Center deepened my appreciation for the impact of the arts in the development of whole healthy individuals and societies.

Adding to the disgust over actions by Trump’s board, Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio of that body, said she was not permitted to speak during the virtual meeting. She has since filed a lawsuit and is being represented by Norm Eisen, who has had much success fighting Trump and his administration in court.

Determined to stay their destructive course, Richard Grenell, interim president/executive director of the Kennedy Center, recently announced the organization would file its own lawsuit—that one against musician Chuck Redd, who had the moral clarity to cancel the annual Christmas Eve Jazz concert after seeing Trump commandeer a dead man’s memorial.  

The Taliban’s 25-day offensive has nothing on Trump.

“This is a whole cultural revolution,” literary activist and award-winning author E. Ethelbert Miller declared in an interview with me earlier this year.

Miller argued that beneath the movement toward an oligarchy is an aggressive campaign to change the content, context and texture of contemporary American culture, including family structures, schools and creative institutions. “It’s not just a mural, not just [Black Lives Matter] plaza. It doesn’t just end there.”

Interestingly, reviewing the reports on this first year of Trump’s return to the White House, there has been scant focus on his unbridled attack on the country’s cultural organizations. So much has happened in these nearly 12 months.  It may be too difficult to hoist a single beating or even the gang-style violence perpetrated by the president and his thugs. But this area of activity must not be buried, considered only after the damage becomes irreparable.  

I feel compelled, therefore, to remind us of what has happened, what is happening. Our souls have been and continue to be hammered.

We should all know the spirit of a people, the vision for themselves and their country can be found in their music, their visual arts, their dancers and writers. Their narrative--the story of their past and of their future—is being written through these artistic expressions and through the institutions that help nurture and fertilize them.

The erosion of the individual spirit, imagination, creative energy ignites the decay of society. The rot may be almost imperceptible at first. However, uninterrupted, it is sure to be absolute. There can be no real democracy without free and independent arts and cultural institutions.  

This is not a rant. This is a warning.

          Violence invites violence. Thus, only six months after the destruction of the Buddhas, al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden—a Taliban supporter--used airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001 to execute a coordinated attack on American iconic structures, including New York City’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon; passengers on a third plane, United Flight 93, piloted by African American LeRoy Wilton Homer Jr,  fought back against their hijackers, crashing in a field near Shanksville, Pa. They killed the criminals and themselves, but prevented the plan from reaching its destination, potentially saving thousands of lives.

Bin Laden would eventually be killed in 2011, in a pre-dawn raid of a house he and his family occupied in Pakistan; it was carried out by U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6.

That wasn’t the end, however. Assaults on historic and culture sites, plundering of repositories of artifacts and antiquities continued seemingly unabated. 

The United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), under the leadership of its then director-general, Irina Bokova, launched a campaign to end the destruction. In February 2015, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 2199.

The next year, in 2016, in a landmark case, the International Criminal Court convicted an al-Qaeda follower for the destruction of 10 cultural sites in Timbuktu, Mali. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. Perhaps demonstrating its commitment to the cause, the UN approved Resolution 2347— The  International  Destruction of Cultural Heritage Resolution—in 2017, making it an international war crime to engage in what Bokova and UNESCO described as “cultural cleansing.”

Syria, Iraq, Libya, Mali were a few of the countries where such cultural cleansing had been prevalent. Should the United States be added to that list?

Absolutely. Trump is a cultural terrorist.

            UNQUESTIONABLY,  2025 will go down in American history as one of massive destruction and death accomplished with an assassin’s zeal by the country’s own president. Trump was aided by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, trillionaire henchman, Elon Musk——a man who wasn’t even born in the United States and whose core philosophy hews closely to eugenics—and a gang of ambitious  teens who may not have even started shaving before, under the auspices of the nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they ravaged agencies, programs, businesses and federal workers.

No one has fully recovered. The number of victims is so staggering, Trump’s actions could be classified as a massacre.  The careers and lives of more than 350,000 Black women were laid to waste--in less than 10 months. In April alone, 106,000 of them were kicked out, dragged out or disappeared from the American workforce.

Not all of their names are known. Some have flashed across newspapers and electronic screens: Army Lt. General Telita Crosland was forced to retire; Susan Rice, a United States ambassador to the United Nations and a former National Security Advisor, was removed from the Defense Policy Board; Gwynne A. Wilcox, with support of the United States Supreme Court, was kicked off the National Labor Relations Board—the first Black woman to serve on that panel; Charlottee Burrows was fired as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and Ronisca Chambers was terminated as finance manager of the Federal Aviation Administration.

While the brutality we witnessed was significant, worthy, in my view, of criminal charges, the damaged to cultural organizations and institutions may have been equally dramatic.

Consider that during his first 100 days, Trump struck The National Archives, the repository of the government’s domestic and international historical and cultural records. It’s not just home of the original Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, it also holds other key documents that provide the American narrative from 1775 through the present, including those that provide insight into the journey of ordinary citizens—census data and naturalization papers of immigrants, among others.

The National Archives also verifies and holds electoral certification during presidential elections: “Records help us claim our rights and entitlements, hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and document our history as a nation.

“In short, NARA ensures continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their Government,” according to the agency’s website.

Someone who believes himself God or god-like, might want to control such a cache of information. Who can forget that as he completed his first term, Trump snatched presidential files and a host of classified documents that rightfully belonged to the American people.

He stashed those documents in cardboard boxes in a Mar-a-Largo bathroom with a gold toilet. He refused to turn them over to FBI agents, who on behalf of the National Archives—and the public—went to reclaim them. A fight ensued, and a Trump appointed judge prevented their return.

Now Trump is planning his presidential library. Who will protect public records?

It is unsurprising that in this second term, he fired archivist Colleen Shogan. Not long after that the deputy archivist retired; the former executive assistant also left as did the inspector general, according to a Feb. 26 Associated Press (AP) report.

“The risk is that an archivist whose primary loyalty is to Trump could be biased…leaving behind a skewed picture of history for future generations,” past Archive employees told AP back then.

A similar motivation probably drove the firing of Carla Hayden. A diminutive woman with a pixie haircut and a calm, quiet demeanor that betrays her robust intellectual power, Hayden was appointed as Librarian of Congress in 2016 by President Barack Obama. She had been the chief executive officer of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore from 1993 until she was plucked to run the world’s oldest library, which is the research arm of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. The library is considered the country’s largest anthropological collection.

That is the perch from which Hayden engaged the country, including national leaders and average citizens, every day--until May 8. That’s when, while visiting her 90-year-old mother in Baltimore, Hayden happened to glance at her cell phone and saw a message from the White House in her email inbox.

"Carla, on behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” Trent Morse, deputy director of Presidential Personnel, wrote. “Thank you for your service.”

Hayden didn’t know him. She initially thought it was a hoax.  In her entire illustrious career, she had “never been fired,” she told a gathering of peers at the American Library Association, a group she led as president from 2003 to 2004.

Asked about the firing by a member of the White House press corps, President Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said that “Hayden did not fit the needs of the American people.”

Ain’t I an American. Hayden certainly fits my needs.

Her narrative and the one she likely was writing as the Librarian of Congress did not comport with what Trump and his gang of white men wanted told. Interestingly, a white man assumed Hayden’s job. In fact, contrary to Charlie Kirk’s assertion, in nearly every key position where a Black woman was fired by the Trump administration, a white man was hired to replace her. (Say hello to white male privilege and supremacy.)

         The National Endowment for the Arts was also mugged. It was forced to rescind millions of dollars in grants. Trump had asserted that only a positive telling of the American story for the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the founding of the Republic would be acceptable. He envisioned a garden of sculptures of so-called heroes. He advocated the return of statues of Confederate soldiers and embraced an image of the family as that of white men with subservient, docile wives and children.

There was no mention of native American nations that were already established in North America before British colonizers arrived on the Mayflower and later decided to fight with their king over money and resources, which neither should have claimed as theirs. Certainly, Trump, who, even before running for president in 2016, consistently stoked racial hatred and division, said nothing about the contributions of millions of enslaved Africans to creating the United States—except to deny the magnitude and inhumanity of slavery in America and other countries around the globe.

If the metaphor for America were a house, Black women would be declared its builders. They laid the infrastructure. Their imprimatur is found in every room. There are also the haunting stories of their sacrifices: the blood spilled as whip slashed their dark flesh. In the basic, and perhaps crudest interpretation, Black women were initial breeders of the country’s economy during the 17th century and 18th century; they gave birth to children only to see them killed or sold. And in far too many instances they smothered their dreams—so many dreams deferred,

The aim of most cultural terrorists is not just to reshape the landscape, making it difficult for a people to know and appreciate their history. They want to place themselves--their values and their self-established validity—at the center and core of that history and culture.

It isn’t accidental that as the country moves to celebrate its 250^th anniversary, the Trump administration has ditched commemorative coins that could have recognized the roles of all Americans. As recently announced, there will be no acknowledgement of Black abolition, women suffrage or civil rights. Instead, the focus will on the Mayflower and Gettysburg. And, of course, a coin will bear Trump’s name and visage.

His intent is to shred all narratives other than those written by him, where he is cast as the sole protagonist. That plot reflects his first term “I and I alone” declaration as being the America’s principal savior.

            THE cultural war and Trumpian greed haven’t been limited to the United States. Trump has sought to strip Canadians of their independence and undoubtedly their culture, trying to force them into becoming this country’s 51^st state. He has stalked Greenland and Panama.  He has plotted to make Gaza a destination resort in the middle east. He tried to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, as if the whole of North America was always and ever will be the preserve of white men, slamming and stealing the heritage and history of Native Americans or of Spanish people who owned much of the southern part of the United States.

He snatched funding from USAID and other federal agencies that was appropriated to help foreign governments and their citizens, particularly those from poor communities. That money was tangible evidence of America’s offensive established to create friends where there could be enemies or at least where enemies might gain footing with allies.

In more than a few instances, portions of those funds went to help marginalized countries tell their stories, celebrate their history and culture. That was certainly the case with Before the Americas, a major art exhibition that was to be presented by the Art Museum of the Americans (AMA) which is part of the Organization of American States.

During the systematic sweeping of DEI policies and programs launched through various executive orders, the AMA cancelled that exhibition, adversely affecting two dozen visual artists, academic scholars and individual collectors. Cheryl Edwards, the chief curator, was caught off guard.  She eventually rallied alternative support and a version of the exhibition was produced. However, back in April during an interview with me, she captured the meaning of it all.

 “If you are not a straight white male who wants to do art about a particular racist period of American history, then you and your creativity and your work are not acceptable,” said Edwards.

“It’s like 1984. It’s like living in a communist country. Everything that is happening is not what America is supposed to be,” sculptor Margery Goldberg said of the Trump administration’s rapid-fire actions in its first two months. Having owned and operated Zenith Gallery in Washington for 47 years, she has witnessed and experienced a great deal of political upheaval in the city and the nation.

Trump brought down his sledgehammer on any initiative that had even a whiff of diversity, equity and inclusion. He hasn’t stopped. He has continued his efforts to annihilate iconic institutions and agencies.  The Republican Congress has obliged his destructive work.

Finding no true or sufficiently powerful opposition, Trump expanded his rampage, his administration gored some of the nation’s major educational institutions—Columbia, Havard, for example-- which often serve as incubators for the country’s arts and cultural communities—places where artists and arts managers are developed and nurtured. He went after the still under construction National Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino.

He fired everyone except four individuals on the National Humanities Council; he even terminated three people who had appointed to the group during his first term. DOGE demanded The  National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) take back tens of millions of dollars in grants.

Rebecca Lemos Otero, executive director of HumanitiesDC, wrote to supporters and recipients of her organization’s programs in a letter dated April 10, 2025 explaining that assault “was designed to dismantle the majority of the 56 [state] humanities councils.

“For HumanitiesDC the funds lost represent half of our operating and public programs budget that powers our community work,” continued Otero. “Past and planned similar cuts across other federal agencies, like the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts, will quickly result in the defunding of our city’s cultural institutions and organizations.

 “Our libraries, archives, arts centers, historical associations - the foundations that help us create, celebrate, and learn from our city’s rich heritage, and in turn help build civic engagement - are all simultaneously under siege,” Otero added. 

What is America bereft of its free and independent arts enclaves and institutions?

NAME it and claim it has been Trump’s game. In the process, he has sought to undermine and redirect. Nowhere is that more dangerous than at The Smithsonian Institution. Comprised of more than 21 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo, it was founded back in 1846 by James Smithson. It may be the largest such facility in the world. It is also free.

The Smithsonian is considered a public-private institution; its funding comes from the federal government and private donors. A 17-member Board of Regents, headed by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, oversees its operation. Other board members include the vice president—currently JD Vance-- six congressional representatives—half appointed by the pro tempore of the Senate and the other half by the speaker of the House--and nine private citizens nominated by the board.

Lonnie Bunch III, PhD., founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, now directs the entire Smithsonian Institution.

Even before many Americans fell in love with the African American museum, I was already a huge fan of the Smithsonian. While I had visited many of its facilities, I developed a more intimate relationship with it as a regional editor for American Visions magazine. Founded by Madelyn Bonsignore, "American Visions," was a bimonthly magazine of African American culture launched inside the National Museum of American History. Bonsignore died in 2003. It was my pleasure to be mentored by her and publisher and chief executive editor Gary Puckrein

The Smithsonian provided some support and technical assistance to the Visions Foundation for development of the publication. Its operation was off campus, but it focused on the history and culture of African Americans and others in the region and the nation.

As a regional editor, I helped shaped the story board, identified writers and worked with them as they carried out their assignments, ensuring timely submissions. There were more than a few of us developing writers, reporters and editors who grew into solid professionals because of our work with “American Visions.”

Given its massive reach and influence, it isn’t surprising that Trump has been stalking the Smithsonian for more than eight years, after his first visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

March 27, 2025 could be considered the opening salvo of  Trump’s second attempt at a hostile takeover. That’s when he signed and release  “Restore Truth to American History”— an executive order that was, in truth, an announcement of the cultural war and his systematic cultural cleansing.

Consistent with his modus operandi, Trump treated his EO as if it were a legal binding document; it wasn’t. But the sycophants in his administration, the ones in whom he struck the fear of “god,” have handled each one as the most recent installment of the Covenant brought down from the mountaintop.

It was supposedly issued to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness –- igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.” 

Trump directed Vance to work “in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary, Lindsey Halligan, Esq., work with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate Majority Leader, to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”

There was nothing opaque or confusing about those directions. He was coming for the Smithsonian. First, he wanted to gather his forces. After all, based on the board’s compositions, he had only seven members on whom he could actually depend to do his bidding—Vance and the congressional representatives. He needed to orchestrate a takeover--much as happened at the Kennedy Memorial Center.

Trump’s order further mandated a review to determine whether “since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

His staff and appointees were to act to “reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent” with various federal codes and laws.

In other words, the president of the United States ordered the ransacking and looting of one of the country’s most priceless historical and cultural repositories with the clear aim of bringing all things under is control and use.

One of the findings by UNESCO and others as they fought global cultural cleansing was that many terrorist organizations were selling antiquities and artifacts on the illegal market to the highest bidders. They were using the ill-gotten funds to finance their operations.

What are Trump’s plans for documents and objects in The Smithsonian’s collections? Will they be placed for auction to the highest bidders the way he has allegedly done with pardons and VISAs and other so-called perks of his presidency?

On August 12, in a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Bunch, Trump demanded his administration be allowed to conduct an internal review of exhibitions and materials. The same posse—Halligan and Vought among them, was rounded up to conduct that raid.

Bunch pushed back quietly and diplomatically, providing directions to his staff, perhaps knowing media will eventually see a copy of his comments. “We will continue to employ our internal review processes which keep us accountable to the public,” he wrote.

“When we err, we adjust, pivot, and learn as needed. As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges, and triumphs,” he continued.

The Smithsonian will “remain committed to telling the multi-faceted stories of this country’s extraordinary heritage,” added Bunch.

He seemed to have the backing of his board. Any review of documents, materials or collections would be conducted by them or experts they hired to assist them.

That August 12 letter included a timetable: Within 120 days of its receipt, the pre-identified museums were to “begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials,” according to the letter.

“If all benchmarks are met on schedule, we anticipate completing our review and preparing a final report for your review in early 2026. This report will include museum-specific assessments, institutional trends, and constructive recommendations for future exhibition strategy,” Vought, Halligan and Vince Haley, assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy  Council, wrote on behalf of Trump.

It should be noted that Vought had worked for Trump during his first term. He wasn’t new at the slaughterhouse.  Equally disturbing, he is one of the masterminds behind Project 2025—a blueprint for the rampaging the federal government and U.S. democracy.

The trio had the audacity to suggest the process is a “collaborative and forward-looking opportunity-one that empowers museum staff to embrace a revitalized curatorial vision rooted in the strength, breadth, and achievements of the American story.

“By focusing on Americanism(their emphasis)—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation—we can work together to renew the Smithsonian’s role as the world’s leading museum institution,” they wrote.

An extended government shutdown interrupted the battle.

One week before Christmas, on December 18, Trump circled back to the Smithsonian. He also advanced his assault on the Kennedy Memorial Center at the same time; his handpicked board completed its run by affixing his name on the side of that historic building.

The Smithsonian had come back into Trump’s sights. Bunch was given until December 30 to provide the requested documents. “As you may know, funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, and the fulfillment of the requests set forth in our August 12, 2025, letter,” wrote Vought and Haley. Halligan had created a mess in aisle six with the failed prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey; her attention was elsewhere.

“We are confident that you share our view that the Smithsonian Institution must lead by example in scholarship, presentation, and accountability. The upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of our Nation offers a singular opportunity to justify confidence in the operations of America’s leading cultural institutions…  ,” Vought and Haley in their version of Trumps way or the highway.

Bunch has already pushed back, essentially telling the White House additional information would be submitted. However, he seemed to be gathering forces the way pilot LeRoy Wilton Homer Jr had on United Flight 93. There would be no takeover of the Smithsonian, no cleansing of the country’s history and culture without an all-out fight. “All content programming and curatorial decisions are made by the Smithsonian,” Bunch wrote.

Is Bunch going to way of Colleen Shogan or Carla Hayden? Will the Smithsonian’s fate be comparable to the Buddhas of Afghanistan?

Are members of the Board of Regents, particularly Chief Justice Roberts prepared to stand with Bunch and others against Trump’s cultural war?

I am less than sanguine about that possibility. After all, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in 2024 that asserted Trump or any future president would have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.

Is the cultural cleansing that has marked the opening of this second term included under that immunity ruling? Who knows?

IN  March 2021, during recognition of the 20^th anniversary of the destruction of the Buddhas, UNESCO’s then-Assistant Director-General for Culture Ernesto Ottone Ramirez wrote in the agency’s courier/newsletter that the loss of the sculptures “revealed how the destruction of heritage could be used as a weapon against local populations.”

Not unlike the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS and other organizations that have appeared on the United States list of terrorist organizations, the Republican Party, with Trump as its leader, has certainly replicated that ploy of cultural heritage destruction with the intent of weaponizing institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian and its network of museums and galleries.

Buddhas, said Ramirez, reminded the world that “defending cultural diversity is not a luxury, but rather fundamental to building more peaceful societies.”

What’s more, “Damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever” is internationally recognized as “damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind.”

In other words, we Americans, who appreciate and understand the value of culture and of our cultural institutions, cannot permit the Kennedy family, NEA, NEH, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution to stand alone. We must become even more engaged, more dedicated to protecting and preserving the memories of this country’s growth and development, including its flaws and its hard-won diversity.

Photo credits: Anton Ivanov/ Shutterstock; Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock