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Trump Administration’s Interference in Artistic and Literary Expression Is Anti-American and Anti-Democratic

Free Speech Literary Culture

May 9, 2025

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“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth,” said President Kennedy in 1963.

“A society that recognizes the enduring significance of the arts and the humanities to the quality and to the future of our civilization will set high value also on diversity and on independence of initiative,” said President Reagan in 1981.

All true democracies place a high value on freedom of expression in the arts and humanities, as have all U.S. presidential administrations until now. The quality of a democracy can be judged by the quality of its arts. Authoritarian regimes suppress and control artistic expression to generate propaganda instead as a means of controlling thought and dissent.

The Trump administration is undoing 250 years of freedom of expression in the arts and humanities, freedom from government using the arts for propaganda. It is doing it by fiat, through a series of unconstitutional executive orders usurping congressional powers, deportations, bullying, threats of criminal action against journalists who report truth, defunding of institutions that permit free speech, and now cancelling congressionally-funded programs in the arts and sciences.

In his first 100 days, the president repeatedly challenged one of the most sacred principles of democracy: that people must be able to express themselves freely, including and especially by challenging the government, and that writing and the arts are a primary means of doing so. His administration’s actions fly in the face of our Constitution and Bill of Rights; rather than make America great, these actions undermine American democracy. As all dictators know, to convince the people to adopt narratives that support your power, they have to silence those who provide narratives that shed light on the truth—the authors and artists.

As one of his first acts in office, the president declared by executive orders that it was illegal for any government entity or anyone who receives any benefits from the government to express certain ideas and viewpoints, namely diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender apart from sex. (See our breakdown of the executive orders here.) Agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), were instructed to ban certain words and terms such as diversity, equity, environmental justice, gender, gay, women, and advocacy (to absurd results) and any programs that touched on the banned concepts. The first administration to unilaterally change the name of an international body of water, it went so far as to ban an Associated Press reporter from the White House after the AP, an international news agency, decided not to adopt the name “Gulf of America.”

Attempts like these to control speech are clearcut viewpoint discrimination, prohibited under the First Amendment. (See our statement against banning words here.)

Then, in the first weeks of his administration, the president announced that he was taking control of the Kennedy Center and appointing himself as chair to make its programming align with his administration’s views. More recently, the administration announced that it would oversee programming at the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, prohibiting any DEI-related programs and ensuring that all programs align with its current views. The Smithsonian, like the Kennedy Center, is not wholly government-owned but a private-public partnership, and it is one of the most distinguished institutions in the world in large part because Congress and every administration until now has recognized its independence from politics and political influence.

Now the administration is trying to destroy the U.S.’s only cultural agencies, the NEA and the NEH, and their grant programs in the arts and humanities—having already mostly dismantled the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The NEA and NEH were created by Congress in 1965 with the understanding set forth in their authorizing legislation that:

Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.

In 1981, President Reagan explained the role of the NEA and NEH thus: “Fostering arts and scholarship, not stifling it, not filtering it, has been the goal of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities … The Endowments … account for only 10 percent of the donations to art and scholarship. Nonetheless, they have served an important role in catalyzing additional private support, assisting excellence in arts and letters, and helping to assure the availability of art and scholarship.”

Trump’s DOGE team, apparently lacking any understanding of the benefits that NEA and NEH bring to so many people, took it upon themselves to destroy 60-year legacies of the U.S.’s only cultural organizations—without the authority to do so—by cutting their congressionally-mandated programs and staff and called for the agencies’ total elimination in the next congressional budget. In early April, DOGE cancelled hundreds of NEH grants that the government had previously committed to and on which recipients relied, having incurred numerous expenses and, in the case of individual grantees, taken leaves from other work, as required. Last week, as expected, the administration also cancelled most NEA grants. Its only basis for all of the terminations was that the grants didn’t align with its “priorities.” The NEH termination letters failed to alert recipients as to what its new priorities are (a later statement said that the funds would go to statues for a National Garden of American Heroes, despite the fact that sculpture is not within the NEH’s mandate). The new priorities described in the NEA termination letters are completely unrelated to the arts.  

Congress created the NEA and NEH grant programs to bring arts and learning to people around the country as well as to promote philanthropy in the arts by requiring that grants be privately matched. Only Congress has the power to defund these agencies, which it refused to do all four years of Trump’s first administration despite his requests. Now, having practically achieved the same result without Congress’ input, the administration is diverting the funds saved by eliminating thousands of low-cost, local humanities education and arts programs around the country—selected for the high value they bring to communities—to a single garden of heroes, which few Americans will likely ever be able to visit.

The,, last night, in another first, Trump attacked the most sacred of our nonpartisan institutions of learning and creativity by firing the highly respected Librarian of Congress, Dr, Hayden, for political reasons—for supporting the Library of Congress’ mission to serve all members of Congress and all Americans by preserving, fostering, and making accessibleAmerican creativity in all its diversity. Her only alleged crimes are being a Democrat and not agreeing to ban books that the far right disagreed with. No other president in history has interfered with the mission of Congress’ library; Trump’s doing so is a shocking affront to intellectual and creative freedom, democratic values, and the integrity of our nonpartisan national institutions.

Let’s be very clear: The Trump administration’s attack on free expression and the arts is a backward step for democracy and culture in the U.S. And lest some are impervious to the fate of democracy and culture, know that undermining our arts will also negatively impact our economy—a not insignificant part of which is driven by the creative sector. Thanks to the support for the arts in this country, we have become the world’s leading creator and supplier of creative arts, exporting our books, films, television programming, games, and music throughout the world. The U.S. creative sector contributed more than $2 trillion to U.S. GDP and employed 11.6 million workers in 2023 alone. Government support for the arts has incubated much of that creativity.

If you would like to help fight back, here is what you can do:

• Write your Congressional representatives. It is important that they hear your concerns and push back on the executive branch’s usurpation of their power.
• Write op eds.
• Buy books and attend arts programs.
• Donate to your favorite literary and arts organizations.
• Join a lawsuit—stay tuned.