The onslaught of reckless and illegal actions taken by the Trump administration has become so incessant that it’s easy to overlook some of the more insidious assaults on our democracy.
Case in point: its escalating attacks on arts and culture.
Last month, the administration’s 2026 budget request proposed completely eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Mere hours later, the administration abruptly canceled hundreds of NEA grants, funding that many small community organizations had already budgeted for upcoming programs.
This is money that was supposed to help pay artists and workers. To teach kids in rural areas. To support local economies.
And let’s not forget, this was funding already appropriated by Congress.
There are many things the president doesn’t understand. But it’s clear he’s fundamentally confused about the role the NEA plays in our economy.
With a relatively small budget, the NEA helps power a $1.2 trillion arts economy, creating jobs and sustaining Main Streets in even the smallest towns. To after-school theater programs in rural towns. To folk festivals that preserve cultural heritage. To local arts councils.
Cutting the NEA doesn’t just silence voices and stymie creators, it erases the spaces where healing, connection and community happen. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is facing a similarly dire fate: nearly 80% of its staff were fired last month, and previously approved grants — including those to state humanities councils — were clawed back in a move that sent shockwaves through the cultural sector.
Even our local libraries have become casualties of this administration, after the president issued an executive order to shut down the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that supports everything from libraries and museums to aquariums and arboretums. And it’s not just local libraries that are endangered.
President Trump recently fired the librarian of Congress in an attempt to wrest control over some of our nation’s most precious collections, as well as the head of the U.S. Copyright Office. These are nonpartisan positions that safeguard our country’s public knowledge. The president has also targeted the Smithsonian Institution, accusing it of promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and not doing enough to “promote American greatness.”
It’s as if he simply wants to sweep slavery, racism and the systematic abuse of Indigenous people under the historical rug, ensuring that future Americans grow up with a distorted version of our nation’s own past—and no tools to understand the injustices of the present.
And in a move that would be laughable if it weren’t so authoritarian, the president removed several members of the Kennedy Center’s board, just so his loyalists could install him as chair.
The pattern here couldn’t be clearer: This administration is trying to sideline anything it deems artistically or culturally offensive, however petty the vendetta, and regardless of the effect its decisions will have on people and communities.
It’s one thing to criticize a particular program or funding stream. But attempting to recast entire agencies in your own political image, or silence expression you don’t like, goes against the values we hold dear: free speech, equal opportunity and the idea that our democracy is strengthened when everyone has access to knowledge, culture and a voice in the national story.
Nowhere are these ideals more vibrantly alive than in the arts, where every community stage, dance company and local museum tells a piece of our collective story. These cultural cornerstones don’t just enrich our lives, they reflect who we are and who we aspire to be.
And the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the arts and culture? This is what despots and dictators do.
Like in Hungary, where Viktor Orban’s authoritarian government gutted independent cultural institutions and rewrote curricula to promote a single political narrative. Or in Turkey, another country currently under autocratic rule, where scholars and journalists have been targeted and public funding for the arts has been slashed to control dissenting voices.
The Trump administration claims these agencies are being redirected to “align with the president’s priorities.” In the case of NEA and NEH, that apparently means setting aside $17 million (each) for a National Garden of American Heroes, a sculpture garden featuring life-sized statues of “250 great individuals from America’s past,” a list that the president apparently chose without any input from the public.
To be sure, the first Trump administration didn’t exactly hide its disdain for cultural institutions: threatening to shutter both the NEA and NEH; trying to eliminate federal funding for public radio and television; repeatedly limiting or discouraging art they deemed overly critical.
The arts have long been an easy target for funding cuts, whether from federal budgets or local school boards. That’s nothing new. But unlike the president’s first term, where we saw a broad bipartisan effort to support funding for the arts, they’re cutting these projects and funding without any input from Congress, this time, and using DOGE as a political shield.
The president’s escalating and plainly unconstitutional attacks reflect a dangerous desire to not only control cultural expression, but to rewrite our history entirely, so that it’s easier for him to shape our future in his image, unchallenged by facts, complexity or dissent.
And with a majority of Republicans refusing to push back in any meaningful way, it’s more important than ever that those of us who believe in artistic freedom and opportunity make our voices heard by advocating for entities like the NEA and NEH, which have contributed so much to America’s artistic and cultural heritage.
And by reminding people that funding for the arts and humanities isn’t just a cultural driver, but an economic one as well, bringing much-needed resources to communities that often lack federal support in Maine and throughout the country.
The president’s attempt to dismantle our artistic and cultural institutions will not “Make America Great Again.”
If anything, we’ll be living in a different country altogether, one where freedom of speech and expression, and the benefits of having arts and culture as a part of every American’s life, is neither valued nor allowed.
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