The New Yorker Radio Hour29 Aug 2025

Donald Trump’s War on Culture Is Not a Sideshow

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.”

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1048)

Rahm Emanuel Says Israel’s Path Is “Not Sustainable Politically”

Rahm Emanuel is a Democratic Party elder, having served in the Clinton and Obama Administrations and as mayor of his native Chicago for two terms. He’s a centrist known for valuing political wins over...

17 Jul 36min

How an Estimated Seven Hundred Thousand People Have Died from DOGE’s U.S.A.I.D. Cuts

The Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, has officially been terminated. Its July 4th sunset date was part of Donald Trump’s original executive order that created the agency, whi...

12 Jul 31min

The World Cup, the Knicks, and LeBron James’s Fate: An All-Time Summer in Sports

With all the sports news at play this summer, from the New York Knicks winning the N.B.A. Finals to Donald Trump having a direct impact on FIFA’s decisions during the World Cup, it’s time for a deep d...

10 Jul 18min

The Sounds of Summer, with Fred Armisen

The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound: he’s a former punk-rocker who gets a lot of comic mileage from doing accents, and he released an album of sound effects—a modern update of a novelty ge...

7 Jul 17min

Alicia Keys’s New York Musical Goes on National Tour

The unofficial anthem of New York City is “Empire State of Mind,” the Jay-Z song with that unforgettable hook, sung by Alicia Keys. So it was only fitting that when New York celebrated the Knicks’ N.B...

3 Jul 32min

From The Political Scene: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Politicization of America’s Spy Agencies

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Jeff Stein, the veteran political reporter and founding editor of the newsletter “Spytalk,” to examine Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as the new acting...

30 Jun 36min

America at 250: A View from Britain, with “The Rest Is History”

Americans tend to see the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War as milestones in world history that inaugurated the era of modern democracy. But the British, unsurprisingly, see these ...

26 Jun 49min

From Critics at Large: Steve Spielberg's Blockbusters

When “Jaws” hit theatres in 1975, no one—neither the studio executives involved nor the film’s twenty-six-year-old director, Steven Spielberg—was betting on its success. But it dominated at the box of...

23 Jun 51min