Culture War by Executive Order: President Trump’s Cultural Directives and the Threat to Libraries and Museums

In the first 100 days of his second administration, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders targeting important federal cultural institutions. These included the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) (Trump 2025b), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Smithsonian Institution. Framed under themes like "restoring patriotism," "ending woke ideology," and “restoring American exceptionalism,” these directives represent an unprecedented use of executive authority aimed at reshaping the mission, governance, and funding of America’s cultural institutions, including libraries, museums, and archives. This situation is not simply an examination of the unitary executive theory or a new form of federalism (Chrastka 2017). Instead, it is a coordinated attempt at cultural capture, a kind of deliberate effort to reconfigure public institutions to reflect and promote a fixed ideological narrative of American identity. These executive orders, especially in the context of the approaching 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026, pose a significant threat to the intellectual neutrality and civic trust that libraries, museums, and archives have maintained for a long time.