Trump 100 days: Arts and culture
The National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall is seen on Friday, March 28, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Dana Gioia, a poet and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, liked to say that a key to maintaining support for the NEA and other federal organizations was ensuring they backed projects in as many congressional districts as possible.
It was a bipartisan formula that lasted for some 60 years, through Democratic and Republican administrations, until Trump’s second term.
Since returning to office, Trump has ousted leaders, placed staff on administrative leave and cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that artists, libraries, museums, theaters and others in the cultural community had long counted on. Acting without congressional authorization, he has declared that institutions ranging from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the National Endowment for the Humanities have become fronts for a “woke” agenda that threatens to undermine what he calls “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
The organizations he has attacked mostly date from the mid-1960s, at the peak of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” domestic programs, when public support for government was high and the elevation of the arts a national priority. The Kennedy Center, the NEA, the NEH and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences all were established with broad backing from the two parties.
The humanities “are the languages, religions, laws, philosophies, and customs that make us distinct,” reads a statement on the NEH website. “They are our history and our cultures, the ideas and movements that have shaped societies throughout time.”
The NEH and others also cite practical benefits; arts and culture are good for economy.
The NEH homepage includes a headline stating that the endowment “supports the humanities in every state and U.S. jurisdiction.” The NEA’s website highlights a recent government study showing that the arts added $1.2 trillion to the economy in 2023 and, at a time when Trump has placed steep tariffs on countries worldwide, notes that “the total value of the nation’s arts exports was nearly $37 billion greater than the value of arts imports from other countries.”
