The New Yorker Radio Hour - Donald Trump’s War on Culture Is Not a Sideshow

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

The term “culture wars” is most often associated with issues of sexuality, race, religion, and gender. But, as recent months have made plain, when Donald Trump refers to the culture wars, he also means the arts. He fired the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Republicans want to rename for him. His Administration fired the national archivist and the Librarian of Congress, and pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign; it is reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what the President calls “improper ideology.” Some view these moves as low-hanging fruit for Trump, and a distraction from bad press about Jeffrey Epstein, the Putin meeting, and tariffs. But Adam Gopnik believes that interpretation is a misreading. The loyalty purge at institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery is a key part of his agenda. “Pluralism is the key principle of a democratic culture,” Gopnik tells David Remnick. Could we be following the path of Stalinist Russia, where a head of state dictated reviews of concerts, Remnick asks? “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.” Gopnik recalls saying after the election that “Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would be next.” “You would see them disappear,” he added. “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.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This 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 taste 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. His 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. What is the nature of this culture war in the second president? I said and see, 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 myself with, that they have been wounded by American culture in some, in some profound way. And they've been lectured to by left-leaning university presidents and teachers and museum curators and mass media and Adam Gopnik or whom, whoever. Yeah, he's particularly annoying because he stands up there yelling.

You can make a rational case that there is. is always something to be said for the populist restimulation 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 can't let 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 humanity's departments in the main universities. And 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. Here, the concerns have to do with air quotes, wokeism.

Right. 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? Much 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 impressionist pulled from the Japanese printmakers, and then the Japanese printmakers learned from the impressionist. The story of the popular music you and I adore is a story of constant hybridization.

Muddy waters get 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. But, 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 in fashion and vogue's and all. 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. The 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 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. At 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 comp, 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, you know, I understand the counterargument, David. I do to say, well, yes, but then where, you know, 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 an 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. Stalin was somebody interested in culture. 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 Shastakovich and ruining the rest of his life, and setting down the parameters of Soviet music. And there were similar examples in Provda and Zvestia 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. Are 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 mentioned 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 were a member, 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. But meanwhile, concerto we just played, will be played again. And this time we will record it and we will applaud it. You know, that is the nature of an authoritarian society.

But I don't see Trump as a cultural consumer is being particularly voracious, if anything, other than really television and television news. He loves Les Miserables, and, you know, I tried for articulate, isn't it? Ironic, I don't think it's quite the adequate word. for what that is. Explain what. Well, Le Miz 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. But 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 the 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, the very idea of a pluralist civilization. The 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. I'm speaking with the New Yorkers, Adam Gopnik. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This 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 time. Amendment itself. I'll continue my conversation now with Adam Gopnik. So 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. And 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 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. be a Trump sycophant, that that would have affected CBS's...

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 the significant... Yeah. But 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, I 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. No, it's through YouTube the next morning. Some of the systematic. You 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 cheery review of the past. 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 insist. that slavery was not the proximate cause of the Civil War, that... But 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 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, 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. Right 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, 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. And 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 a 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. It was straightforward propaganda. It has no authentic desire to explore the complicated and many-sided issues in a national history, but simply wants to lay over by now very familiar America First, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph McCarthy, fiction about American history. And we don't need the fiction. That's one of the things that's so painful about it.

You can, you know, we're grown up people. We can count it too. We can say we're immensely patriotic Americans, hugely proud of the inheritance of the Declaration of Indeastern. 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. Trump 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 onto? 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 MoMA and making notes on the tendentious nature of their narrative. Well, let's call it his administration. Right. It's indisputable, right, that there has been a move compensatory in its, in its, and it. 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. That 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. 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, we're left out of that story as it was first being told.

Does that negate the value of Mark Rothka and Jackson Pollock? No, it expands it. It makes us understand that moment of artistic ferment in a much broader way. No, what should suggest that the culture warriors on the right are rushing to the defense of Mark Rothka? No, and David, you know, 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, I've been writing about them, we have had an extraordinary moment of a pluralistic cultural revolution where things that at once seem very terribly threatening, damaging, like modern art, have come to be part of the common experience. And 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 regimes 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. On 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, you know, 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. Here'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 fixation. 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. What good does wit do? Another well-poised jab at the Trumpies. 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 French version of hilarious. Because when he was writing for Kambat, the French Resistance Journal, basically it was read by nobody, right? Because it was a subterranean resistance journal, right?

And yet he wrote these beautiful. 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. They 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 the... Why he calls it Le Miserables'Hab. He said, all of these people who we don't know well are emiserated. Are emissurated and they're engaged in the same daily struggle for a meaningful life that everyone is. It's why we love, why even Donald Trump loves

Les Miz, because when they sing, bring him home, it has real weight because it comes from Cugo'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 a fire about annexing Canada. We 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 put that aside for the moment, right? So that's, you know, that may be the, if you like, the Louie Napoleon side of Trump. It goes 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 in Washington, D.C., Chicago shortly. This is not... New York, I assume, is coming? Yes. The one thing I'll say about, you know, Trump's ability to be constantly omnipresent is, and this is a genuinely, I think,

an interesting and significant generational divide. My daughter, Olivia, just graduated from college, is, you know, politically active, organizing conferences. And the side of Trump that I find degrading, she finds not normal, but certainly understandable, right? That is the round-the-clock drumming on social media and so on. And her response and the response of her generation is, we have to do the same.

It's Mondami doing the treasure hunt, right? The scavenger hunt. It's the understanding that that's the cockpit, that's the Coliseum in which this war is fought and that in some social media social media TikTok vertical videos the whole idea that you have to be plugged in in a different way you know John updike to my mind the greatest single writer whoever grace these pages and these halls once wrote memorably said at any moment an old world is passing and a new world is coming into being

we have sharper eyes for the fall than the rise because the old world is the one we know And I've always thought that the wisdom of that is something that all of us should keep perpetually in mind and not in... So you're suggesting we'll survive this and worse? I hope and believe we will survive this and worse. The daily dose of even the kind of minimal courage it takes to write something is something, I'm sure you feel this, that you have to draw on again. Who wants it, really? You know, but it's... No, you know, sometimes I feel, Adam and not...

is I don't want to write about this at all after a while. I want to be able to go to a museum and think about art or read a book and think about the novel and not be completely consumed all the time with politics. There's no relief from it. It feels more oppressive. I feel blessed because I still write with joy about the Frick Museum opening or arguments about the history of the Renaissance and so on. They all turn around, though, the same fundamental underlying issue,

and that is the persistence of a humane civilization in an inhumane time. Well, how much of this matters what we've been talking about in the sense that we've now have statistics that tell us that reading has diminished, going to the communal movie theater has diminished, that something has happened to our attention spans and the way we're reading or not and what we're looking at or not. How much does this culture war matter? You know, I'm something of an optimist, or at least a bit of a neutralist about that. And to use a terrible prefix to a sentence, you and I are old enough to remember when people said about television, network television, right? There was a famous book, Four Arguments for the abolition of television. Right.

So I'm a bit of a steady state thinker about how those things proceed. But I think that what you put your finger on, though, is that the problem is that politics should be arguments about policy, if you like. How high should interest rates be? What's the best way of providing housing? What's the, and then deeper issues. I'm, you know, believe in gun control. But people believe the guns are a form of autonomy. Those are all arguments we can have. Eliminating the possibility, denigrating the necessity of a pluralist civilization is a kind of plague that I think is almost impossible to recover from. And it's our job. not to persuade because we have limited power to do that,

but to assert the value of pluralism over and over every week, if you like, and certainly always in our work. The last time you hear you made some dire predictions about what would happen, and if anything, they've been eclipsed by worse. There's in excess of three years left in this administration, if things go their normal way. What do you predict in terms of culture war and the eclipsing of democratic norms further? It could very well continue to go worse and worse.

The 20th century was a horrible century, but it taught one unmistakable lesson, which was that you had to be as hard on the totalitarian temptations of the left as you did on the authoritarian appetites of the right. And it was perilously easy then, as it is perilously easy now to say, Well, but they're on my side. And you see this happening on the right all the time. Otherwise, decent people who know what kind of an authoritarian Trump is, who recognize it, who have no sympathy with him as a human being or is an idealist.

But the other side is so dangerous. They're so woke. They're so anti-Semitic. They're so, you know, you can find a hundred reasons. And then you make a deal with the devil. And that's why we call it, you know, Vichy. That was the key thing, thing, property of the Vichy regime in France and the Second World War. It was that all of those right-wing intellectuals hated the Nazis, hated the Germans, but they hated Leon Bloom and the socialists even more.

That was a deal they made with the devil that France has regretted ever since. It was a primal wound to French dignity and to French continuity. We are in the process of inflicting a similarly primal wound on our health. ourselves if we are, if we do not remember the lesson that history teaches us, which is you have to be equally discerning and equally determined not to fall prey to that temptation. Adam Gopnik, thank you. David, pleasure to talk to you. Adam Gopnik is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and you can find his work at

New Yorker.com. By the way, this week, we published a special anniversary issue all about the culture industry, an issue in which Jillipur considers Trump's directive to the Smithsonian, and many of our reporters examine everything from the fall of pop music criticism to the rise of 824, the hottest movie studio around these days. And if you look closely, there is something anomalous about the cover as well. You can read all of it and see all of it at New Yorker.com. And you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well, New Yorker.com.

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