Donald Trump’s War on Culture Is Not a Sideshow

0:02This is The Political Scene, and I'm David Remnick.

0:11This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Usually when we talk about the culture wars, we mean issues of sexuality, race, religion, and gender. But as recent months have made plain, when Donald Trump thinks about the culture wars, he also very distinctly means the arts. Trump has very definite tastes in what he likes to see and what repels him, too. At the start of his second presidency, Trump fired the board of the Kennedy Center, and now the Republicans would like to rename the building for him.

0:51His administration pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign, and they fired the National Archivist and the Librarian of Congress. His attorneys are reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what the president calls improper ideology. Now, one reading of all this is that culture makes an easy target. It seems elite, and that all this is a deflection from the Epstein noise and the Ukraine war and the tariffs and so much else. But my colleague Adam Gopnik believes this is a serious misreading. Adam writes widely for The New Yorker about culture and history and much else, and we spoke last week.

1:37What is the nature of this culture war in the second presidency? not just the details, but what is it aimed at doing? What is it? What is it not? You know, I can't speak for Trump's intentions, and often I think we make a mistake in overreading his intentionality and imagining that there's a scheme when there's simply a set of stimulus and responses that go on. I think that there's this enormous sense, certainly around the people who he surrounds himself with, that they have been wounded by American culture in some profound way. That they've been lectured to by left-leaning university presidents and teachers and museum curators and mass media and Adam Gopnik or whomever.

2:31Yeah, he's particularly annoying because he stands up there yelling. You can make a rational case that there is always something to be said for the populist re-stimulation of American culture. It's part of the Jacksonian tradition, of course. Pluralism is the key principle of a democratic culture. We have no trouble in our lives appreciating the art of the Las Vegas Strip or the late Elvis and at the same time reading Tolstoy. Those are not activities that cancel each other out. But what he's attacking, when I say he, I mean Trump. And Trumpism. What they're looking at, for example, is humanities departments in the main universities.

3:15And it's saying it's completely left. It's reminiscent of William F. Buckley at Yale many, many years ago. Many, many years ago, suggesting that it's a persistent theme, not some new discovery. But with different themes. Buckley was concerned with Catholicism being pushed out and so on. And here the concerns have to do with air quotes, wokeism. Their concerns have to do with the study of history, which is very familiar to me coming from having lived in falling Soviet Union, the importance of that. To what degree is there a point there? And to what degree is this a full-blown culture war that scares the hell out of you?

3:56Much more the second than the first. And at the same time, because that's the obligation of the liberal imagination, of course there's a point there. I've written at length over the years against progressive pieties as they take control of cultural institutions. For example? Well, the whole idea of cultural appropriation I've always found absurd and have said that. Culture is in its nature. Art, forget the word culture, which is an ugly word. Art and civilization are in their nature hybrid activities. The impression is pulled from the Japanese printmakers and then the Japanese printmakers learn from the impressionists.

4:32The story of the popular music you and I adore is a story of constant hybridization. Muddy Waters gets sent out to the port of Liverpool and it comes back five years later as the Beatles and the Stones. That's healthy, essential. That's what civilization is, is the constant hybridization of kinds. So the rhetoric of cultural appropriation is something inherently sinister. I think is crazy. And to the degree that that's typical of one face of a particular kind of cultural, you should forgive the expression, hegemony of a particular kind of cultural conformity. Of course, there's something in that.

5:10But, and this is the biggest but of our time, there is all the difference in the world. There's a difference of night and day between the unfortunate tendency of intellectuals and artists to trope towards conformity and a declared state policy on the arts. One is the normal working out of a civilization. Of argument. Of argument and persuasion and change and fashion and vogue and all of those things that come and go. And the other is the model of the authoritarian control of art. That is the state dictates an ideological line. So we're now seven months into a second term, Adam. Sketch out how you see what Trump is doing, his strategy, the details of it, and what it all might resemble from past experience abroad.

5:57The key thing is that a democracy rests on lots of pedestals. But the two key ones, I think, are obviously free and fair elections and the rule of law somehow defined. And the other just as important is social coexistence. It's having a pluralist culture. It's people understanding that our tastes, our creed, our faith cannot trump, so to speak, all the others. So having pluralist cultural institutions is not the, you know, the windshield decor on a democracy. It's the foundation of a democracy. We should be able to say, and in the past we have been able to say, you know, Tony Kushner's politics are well to the left of center and David Mamet's politics are way to the right of center.

6:44At least they are now. But they are both, in an arguable sense, great playwrights who have changed the nature of American theater. And it should not be difficult for us to have a national stage in which both Kushner and Mamet make an appearance. Are we heading toward a culture conf, a culture war in which the president of the United States says that angels in America can't be at the Kennedy Center? Yes, Angels in America, Hamilton, the most conservative work of musical theater ever written, that those things are inadmissible because they are woke or because they are lefty. Now, I understand the counterargument, David.

7:19I do to say, well, yes, but then where are the Ivy League institutions that are teaching Mark Halperin and David Mamet and even Tennessee Williams, right? And that's not an empty argument, but again, there's all the difference in the world between the processes of persuasion and argument that produce cultural debate. And policy. And policy and the imposition of a cultural line, which depends as it did, and I will use the instances as it did in the Soviet Union under Stalin, as it did in Nazi Germany, as it does in every authoritarian country. It depends on allegiance to the boss. Well, let's take this Soviet experience as an example.

8:03Stalin was somebody interested in culture. Lenin, in fact, that was the price of the ticket to be a leader of the Communist Party. You had to at least feign interest in Russian literature and music, and you had the spectacle of Stalin going to one of the great concert halls in Moscow and witnessing a Shostakovich performance and then coming back and essentially dictating a review, denouncing Shostakovich and ruining the rest of his life and setting down the parameters of Soviet music. And there were similar examples in Pravda and Izvestia about Russian literature, and you knew who was out and who was in, and there was a writer's union that you had to belong to in order to get published.

8:49Are we heading in that direction? Look, I pray and believe that we are not, but that is certainly the direction in which one inevitably heads when the political boss takes over key cultural institutions and dictates who's acceptable and who is not. It's funny you mention Stalin. I was just watching that great movie, The Death of Stalin. And that's what it's all about. He's once a recording, if you remember, of the Mozart piano concerto. And everybody is in desperate straits to reproduce a non-existent recording. I have wonderful news. Comrade Stalin loved tonight's concerto and would like a recording of it right away, which we don't have for reasons that are myriad and complex.

9:32But meanwhile, the concerto we just played will be played again. And this time we will record it and we will applaud it. Yes. You know, that is the nature of an authoritarian society. But I don't see Trump as a cultural consumer as being particularly voracious of anything other than really television and television news. He loves Les Miserables, Les Mis. And, you know, I tried that's ironic, isn't it? I don't think it's quite the adequate word for what that is. Explain why. Well, Les Mis is Victor Hugo's great novel of protest against social injustice. It is the ultimate expression of the social justice warrior armed with a pen.

10:16But I think more significantly, it's a protest against authoritarianism. Very specifically, it's about Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's nephew who ruled France for almost 20 years and whom Hugo was implacably against in ways that are eerily parallel to Trumpism. Now, we can look back on it and say it was, as autocracies go, a relatively – put this word in heavy quotes – benign one. How do you make sense of the specific moves that Trump has made so far in where the head of the National Portrait Gallery is forced out? The board and the leadership of the Kennedy Center is overturned. These are daily insults to the very idea of a pluralist civilization.

11:07The people were let go from the Kennedy Center board because they were not primarily loyal to Trump. Everything is redefined on an axis in which there is only loyalty.

11:23I'm speaking with The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. We'll continue in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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12:23This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Adam Gopnik. Adam has written for many years at the New Yorker on questions of culture in history and democracy. He's thought very hard about what makes a democracy live and breathe and also what can bring it to an end. We've been speaking about Donald Trump's campaign to seize control of American culture on a number of levels, museums, universities, performing arts centers, any institution that receives government support. Trump wants to root out what he calls improper ideology, a phrase that would seem to threaten the First Amendment itself.

13:03I'll continue my conversation now with Adam Gopnik.

13:10So far, the moves, for the most part, have been aimed at institutions that are within the government's easy reach. How do you think it will affect institutions that are a bit more distant, whether it's a movie studio? Well, David, I will say I said after the election that the first thing you would see would be mass pardons and everybody was saying at the time, not everyone, but many people were saying, oh, he'll pardon the lesser offenders, but he won't try to let the really violent people who beat up cops go. They all came out. They all came out, including people who had been violent on his behalf against cops.

13:47And then I said, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would be next. Six months on, you would see them disappear. Now, we have elaborate rationales for Stephen. The elaborate rationale for Stephen Colbert is that the show is losing 50 million bucks a year. Right. That may well be true. Do you suspect, David, that if Stephen Colbert were known to be a Trump sycophant, that that would have affected CBS's equation? I'm not saying I accept this rationale. And apparently when they were toting up these numbers, they didn't include the money that comes from cable affiliates. Well, that's a significant— Yeah.

14:20But the point is that you can see how effectively that happens. And it is typical of every authoritarian society. Talk to your Hungarian friends about how it happens. and each time we find a rationale for it or a rationale is offered and it's much easier for us to swallow the rationale than to face the reality because by swallowing the rationale we can say, well, I enjoyed Stephen Colbert, but really when was the last time you watched Stephen Colbert's show in its time slot, right? It's not the way we experience comedy. It's through YouTube the next morning. YouTube the next morning. Some of this is thematic.

14:55You look at the effort against museums in Washington and one of the themes that constantly comes up, whether it's the African-American Museum or elsewhere, is about slavery. Trump was given a tour of the African-American History Museum and he's complained that museums focus too much on, quote, how bad slavery was and want us to focus on a, I suppose, a cheerier view of the past. Yeah, listen. This has the ring of familiarity. Yes. I mean, obviously, it has been the case since 1865 that there is a very powerful current in American life that wants to rehabilitate the Confederacy and insists that slavery was not the proximate cause of the Civil War.

15:39But why would Donald Trump, who was born and raised in Queens, care about this? Is that an attention to his constituency? David, I hardly need to remind you that Donald Trump came to prominence as a political figure by saying that Barack Obama was not an American. If he weren't lying, why wouldn't he just solve it? And I wish he would, because if he doesn't, it's one of the greatest scams in the history of politics and in the history period. You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. He may not have been born in this country. And I'll tell you what, three weeks ago, I thought he was born in this country.

16:13Right now, I have some real doubts. That's what he rose on. It's so typical of what happens. We've sort of written that out now. And we say, oh, well, Trump rose because he spoke to dispossessed Middle Westerners. He wasn't talking about economic anxiety. He was talking about how Barack Obama, a black man, was not an American. So why are we surprised when that reappears in the context of the debate on the Smithsonian? Once again, and this is the hard part where your intellectual integrity goes to war with your five-alarm sense of the threat to democracy. Of course it's possible to have arguments and we could debate the famous 1619 project about exactly how essential racism and slavery are to the foundation of America.

17:00And a perfectly reasonable case can be made that though they were one essential stream, the stream running in the opposite direction, the abolitionist stream and the Quaker stream and all of those things, that's why we had a civil war. That's why they called it the Civil War because there was a powerful stream running in the other direction. That's an argument about history that is worth having. But the 1776 project, which was constructed to— Counter the 1619. The basis of that was what, in your view? It was straightforward propaganda. Straightforward propaganda. There's no authentic desire to explore the complicated and many-sided issues in a national history, but simply wants to lay over a by now very familiar America first, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph McCarthy, fiction about American history.

17:52And we don't need the fiction. That's one of the things that's so painful about it. You can – we're grown-up people. We can count to two. We can say we're immensely patriotic Americans, hugely proud of the inheritance of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. and at the same time we recognize how much exploitation, cruelty, and particularly in the history of slavery, outright evil there was in the founding as well. You have to be emotionally stunted not to be able to say both things are true at once and we can recognize both truths. Let's talk about the museum world, which you know so well.

18:25Trump has claimed that museums are, quote, the last remaining segment of woke. Well, you laugh, I laugh, but what is he talking about there? And what's he fastening on to? What granules of reality is he focusing on? I very much doubt that Trump has been through, you know, the last six exhibitions at the Metropolitan and at MoMA and making notes on the tendentious nature of their narrative. Well, let's call it his administration. Right. Right. It's indisputable, right, that there has been a move, compensatory in its original motives, to rewrite the history of art as it's told in our museums to make it, if I can use the word, more inclusive, to include more women, more people of color who, and it's perfectly fair to say, have largely been left out of that story.

19:17That is a process that's perpetually ongoing in which intellectuals and curators and academics and critics are engaged in perpetual conflict and perpetual argument. And over time, those arguments tend – they don't tend to get resolved but they tend to produce new work, interesting new angles, interesting new advantages. is, you know, we wouldn't want now to think about the history of abstract expressionism without including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner and artists who were, it's absolutely true, were left out of that story as it was first being told. Does that negate the value of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock?

19:58No, it expands it. It makes us understand that moment of artistic ferment in a much broader way. The culture warriors on the right are rushing to the defense of Mark Rothko. No. And David, you know, it's part of it is deeply to my mind, and I use this word cautiously, is deeply tragic. Because one of the triumphs of American civilization with all of its deficits and God knows, you know, I've been writing about them. We have had an extraordinary moment of pluralistic cultural revolution where things that had once seemed terribly threatening, damaging, like modern art, have come to be part of the common experience.

20:36And to see it being ripped apart is not trivial. It's a profound failure and one we have to protect while remaining aware, if I may say remaining awake, to the inevitable limitations of progressive pieties and power. One of the things that obtains an authoritarian and a totalitarian regime is not just the official moves against publishing houses, museums, academia, and so on, but what it produces in artists, intellectuals, and so on, the phenomenon of self-censorship. The fear then is how you reach people. In other words, your powers of persuasion as a writer, if you keep banging on every single day about the latest outrages, and they come every single day in multiplicity.

21:28On the hour, yes. I'm afraid so. What language do you use? How do you behave as a writer, as a communicator, as a journalist, as an essayist, so that you have some effect beyond preaching to the choir who is prepared to hear this and accept that language. How do you convince anybody of anything and not be defeated? It's a profound question. On the first part, whenever someone talks about you're preaching to the choir, I don't feel that that's true. What you're doing is you're teaching the choir how to sing in tune. In other words, you're saying, here's the language, the kind of language we should use.

22:05Here's the kinds of things we should care about. You can use the language of rationality. You can use the language of liberal humanism, if I may call it that, to remind people of what the right tone is to use as opposed to the hysterical or ideologically fixated tones that we can so easily fly into. How do you respond to readers who say, just, Adam, it's already bad enough. You're hysterical. Nobody's bursting into this studio to arrest you. to censor you? Take it easy, Adam. I'd say, yes, we should take it easy in the sense that we should turn to a language of wit and humanity in everything I write.

22:49What good does wit do? Another well-poised jab at the Trumpies. Wit does everything. You know who one of my greatest heroes is, David? Maybe my single greatest hero is Albert Camus, right? And why? Because when he was writing... A hilarious writer. Well, a man of great sardonic irony, a different French version of Hilarious, because when he was writing for Cambat, the French resistance journal, basically it was read by nobody, right? Because it was a subterranean resistance journal, right? And yet he wrote these beautifully crafted, many-veined, multifaceted essays that were not, as the work of the Communist Party in France was in that way, narrowly, brutally ideological.

23:31They were trying to make sense out of a time that made no sense. That's our task and that's our job. And it doesn't – our job, I think, is not to persuade in the first instance because who knows how persuasion happens. Victor Hugo wasn't trying to persuade. He was trying to remind. He was trying to alert. He was trying to – To get the reader to see. To see. To get the reader to see and to offer an alternative vision of human possibilities than the one that was being dictated by the Second Empire and by Louis Napoleon. He was saying that's why he calls it Les Mis-Arab. He said all of these people who we don't know well are immiserated and they're engaged in the same daily struggle for a meaningful life that everyone is.

24:15It's why we love – why even Donald Trump loves Les Mis because when they sing Bring Him Home, it has real weight because it comes from Hugo's ability to absorb the entirety of his own society. Trump's attention span is a very important element of our politics and our time. Much depends on his ability or inability of desire or non-desire to follow through on the impulse of the day. How far do you think this culture war will go as opposed to all the other fronts that he's fighting on? You know, the truth is, is that I recall as someone raised in Canada, right, when Trump was all afire, about annexing Canada.

24:58We haven't heard very much about that in the last while. Mark Carney... The only thing it seemed to do was to mobilize Canadian politics. Yes, and change the result of the election from a conservative to a liberal. But he seems to have put that aside for the moment, right? So that's, you know, that may be the, if you like, the Louis Napoleon side of Trump. It goes back and forth in that way. But I don't think we can underestimate it. There are troops in the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Chicago shortly. This is not— New York, I assume, is coming. Yes. The one thing I'll say about Trump's ability to be constantly omnipresent is—and this is a genuinely, I think, an interesting and significant generational divide.