President Donald Trump may be leaving office in January 2029, but he’s taking all the right steps to ensure his legacy lives much longer.
His appearance at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, announcing the 2025 honorees was just more proof that Trump understands it’s not enough to focus on politics if he wants to leave a transformed America.
As the now-deceased Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.”
And Trump, who became a national pop icon during his days of hosting TV’s “The Apprentice,” is showing in his second term that he understands that.
Welcome to the most exciting conservative revolution.
Trump isn’t just focused on legislation. He’s also focused on our institutions, including our cultural ones, which so pervasively dominate Americans’ minds and imaginations.
Just consider this: In the 2024 presidential election, 154 million Americans voted, according to the U.S. Census. But that same year, about 200 million Americans went to a movie theater, according to The National Association of Theatre Owners. That doesn’t even include all the Americans who watched TV or movies on streaming services.
In the past few weeks, Trump has announced the building of a big, beautiful ballroom at the White House—a welcome addition that stands in marked contrast to the depressing, heavy brutalist architecture that dominates Washington, D.C. He’s shared that he will be hosting the Kennedy Center Honors awards ceremony later this year, after he successfully changed the leadership of the beloved Washington, D.C., institution.
“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation,” the president wrote on Truth Social in February.
Trump is also holding the Smithsonian museums accountable. The museums, which receive more than half of their funding from the federal government, have long skewed left.
Yet many of the 21 museums are must-sees for the tourists, including students, who come to Washington, D.C., every year to learn about our country’s history and more. Just in 2024, nearly 17 million people visited the Smithsonian museums and zoo.
But what are they learning there?
Jillian Michaels, formerly known for being a fitness trainer on “The Biggest Loser,” and now a podcast host, noted on the social media platform X that an exhibit in a Smithsonian museum about Cuba omitted reference to Cuba’s communist regime and how many Cubans fled to the U.S. because of it.
The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan reports that the National Museum of African Art includes a video where George Floyd is cast as a Jesus Christ-like figure. At the National Museum of American History, there is an exhibit, “Rallying Against Racism,” that looks at San Francisco Chinatown residents’ experience during COVID-19 with “Asian-American hate.”
Describing the exhibit’s text, Olohan quotes, “As COVID-19 spread across the United States in early 2020, San Francisco’s Chinatown community was already shunned, even targeted by those who considered the disease ‘the China virus.’”
Trump, you may remember, called COVID-19 “the Chinese virus”—not because of racism, but because there was good reason to believe, even in the pandemic’s early days, that it originated from a lab leak in China.
Mike Gonzalez, Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, reported that the National Museum of African American History glorified a woman who most would not consider one of America’s finest.
“At the National Museum of African American History, I counted at least four likenesses of Angela Davis— more, I think, than there are of Martin Luther King. One of them called Davis a scholar-activist, another had a poem that read, ‘the only thing you’re guilty of is being a black woman, to the core,’” Gonzalez writes.
“That’s not quite right. Davis purchased the guns that were used in the Marin County Courthouse terrorist attack to kill a judge in 1970. She was on the FBI’s most wanted list. She ran for vice president twice on the Communist Party ticket. She is still an unrepentant communist, an ideology that has killed more than 100 million people.”
Oh, and did I mention that an exhibit on Title IX and women’s sports talks about William Thomas, who wishes to be known as Lia, as being “assigned male at birth” and uses female pronouns for him?
Clearly, the Smithsonians slant left.
So earlier this week, the Trump administration took action. In a letter Tuesday to Lonnie Bunch, who leads the Smithsonians, three prominent Trump administration officials write, “As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.”
“[W]e will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions,” continues the letter, which was penned by Special Assistant to the President Lindsey Halligan, Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
Bravo.
There’s no reason the Smithsonian museums should present a biased view of history, gender identity, and so much more. And there’s no reason the Kennedy Center should skew woke. It’s a breath of fresh air to see Trump recognize he can—and should—transform these institutions.
