Portrait of a Vandal:
Trump Fires National Gallery Director Over “Wokeness”
It is a pitiful marker of the cultural IQ of a declining republic that the President of the United States—Donald J. Trump, a man for whom art has always been merely the wallpaper of ego—has decided to remove Kim Sajet from her position as Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Her crime, according to the president’s own blaring, characteristically illiterate dispatch on Truth Social, was that she was “highly partisan” and a “strong supporter of DEI,” which he pronounced, with the finality of a mall-court pharaoh, as “totally inappropriate” for her position.
Thus, Sajet—a scholar, a curator, an immigrant, and yes, a believer in the revolting notion that American culture might benefit from including more than just dead white men in powdered wigs—has been summarily fired by a man whose own official portrait, should it ever be permitted to hang in any institution not run by QVC, would properly be rendered in crayon, ketchup, and spray tan.
Let us be clear: Trump’s disdain for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is not rooted in philosophical disagreement. This is not Burke versus Rousseau. It is not even Nixon versus the NEA. It is the flailing tantrum of a man who sees any nod to pluralism as a threat to the soft, white dough of his self-image. “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” his executive order declares—as if “truth” had ever flowed from Mar-a-Lago except as a casualty.
Kim Sajet’s résumé would be impressive to any thinking person—which is to say, not the present administration. Born in Nigeria, raised in Australia, educated in Europe and the U.S., with a doctorate from Georgetown and executive training at Harvard, she represents precisely the sort of worldly intellect that Trump regards with uncomprehending suspicion, like a terrier eyeing a ceiling fan. That she curated not just the Obama portraits but presided over their five-city tour—bringing Americans face to face with the visages of a presidency Trump still broods over like a Shakespearean ghost—is surely the unforgivable sin here. She let the nation celebrate its cultural evolution, and for that she must be punished.
To call Trump’s act stupid is to underestimate the word. It is anti-intellectual, certainly, but it is also anti-civic. It is the cultural equivalent of urinating on a library, then blaming the librarian for the smell. Under Sajet, the Portrait Gallery did not become a “leftist den,” as the president’s unwashed footmen might shout on cable news; it simply became relevant. She ushered in exhibitions that asked real questions: Who gets remembered? Who gets seen? What does portraiture mean when the faces on the wall start to resemble the nation beyond the old elite?
Trump, of course, wants a Portrait Gallery where every wall is a mirror. A nation of one face, his, endlessly repeated like some capitalist Warhol nightmare: Trump in a cowboy hat. Trump in a flight suit. Trump next to Lincoln, Trump over Lincoln. That’s the limit of his aesthetic: narcissism cosplaying as patriotism.
His war on “wokeness” in museums—oh, what a depressing phrase, as if cultural institutions are now battlefields in the fetid imaginations of the aggrieved—is just another twitch in his long campaign against history that fails to flatter him. “Race-centered ideology,” he calls it, as if history itself were an act of aggression. In truth, what Trump cannot tolerate is ambiguity. The museum to him is either a loyalty test or a heresy.
Firing Sajet is part of a wider purge—he’s already sacked the Librarian of Congress, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, and the Commandant of the Coast Guard. At this rate, the next head to roll will be the bronze statue of Frederick Douglass for being too verbose. The president is trimming the nation’s cultural branches with a blowtorch, leaving nothing behind but the smoke of grievance and cheap nostalgia.
The tragedy, of course, is not only that such a vandal holds power, but that so many cheer him on. In a healthy society, the dismissal of a museum director over “support” for inclusion would provoke outrage, not applause. But we are no longer a society invested in complexity or memory. We are a culture nursing its resentments like whiskey, grumbling at clouds and calling it populism.
Robert Hughes once said that the loss of critical thinking in American public life was “the slow death of the republic by boredom and bile.” This, then, is another knifewound in that body. Sajet’s removal is not a minor administrative change. It is a cultural obscenity, the replacement of merit with malice.
But let us not mourn too long. The galleries may be stripped. The plaques may be rewritten. But art, real art, will survive its saboteurs. And so will history.
Because the problem with purging the past, Mr. President, is that eventually it comes back—in portrait form.
And it remembers.
