The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights
On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery is one of the most important branches of the Smithsonian Institution, the complex of national museums that, for almost 200 years, has told the story of the nation. The director’s suite, large enough to host a small party, has a grandeur befitting the museum’s role as the keeper of portraits of the United States’ most significant historical figures. Sajet was working beneath the gaze of artworks from the collection, including a striking 1952 painting of Mary Mills, a military-uniformed, African American nurse, and a bronze head of jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters.
It seemed like an ordinary Friday. Until, that is, an anxious colleague came in to tell Sajet that the president of the United States had personally denounced her on social media. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social. According to the post, Sajet was “a highly partisan person” and a “strong supporter” of diversity and inclusion programmes, which by an executive order on his inauguration day, 20 January, he had eradicated from federal agencies. “Her replacement will be named shortly,” continued the message. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Sajet is a Dutch art historian, raised in Australia, who is in her early 60s. She has platinum blond hair, and wears trouser suits in bright colours and statement spectacles. Her manner is warm and open, but she also projects an air of professional control. When we met in autumn 2025, she seemed so determined not to say anything controversial that I struggled to believe that anyone could consider her radical. She recalled that, after absorbing Trump’s post, she shot a look at her shaken colleague, and asked: “Are you OK?”
“It honestly was another day in the office,” Sajet told me. “Truly, I don’t think people realise that as soon as you become a director at the Smithsonian, you are a public figure.” In the 12 years she had been running the museum, members of Congress were constantly questioning displays, she said. A disgruntled painter whose portrait of Trump she had refused to put on display – because, she said, the work was of insufficient quality – had pursued her through the courts for years.
But surely, I asked, the president personally firing her on social media was something else? She shrugged, her tough outer coating intact. “I think we can all agree we live in unusual times,” she said.
It had, perhaps, been only a matter of time before Trump targeted a senior figure from the Smithsonian Institution. In February, Trump had declared himself, despite having no authority to do so, chair of the Kennedy Center, the US’s national centre for the performing arts, and vowed to end “woke” programming – a prelude, it turned out, to actually renaming the organisation after himself, with workmen adding his name, in slightly mismatching type, above that of Kennedy’s on the building’s facade this Christmas. At the national museums, there had been some hope his attention to the arts might peter out there. After all, the Smithsonian, as well as the National Gallery of Art, a separate body, had pre-emptively shut down their diversity offices soon after Trump’s executive order, despite not themselves being federal agencies….
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After the truth-shower 