President Donald Trump has intensified efforts to shape American cultural institutions, ordering reviews of the Smithsonian, pressing changes at the Kennedy Center, and curbing federal arts support while proposing high-profile patriotic projects — developments that commentators and historians say echo earlier government campaigns to steer the nation’s cultural life.
In his second term, Trump has sought to reorient federal cultural priorities toward large, representational spectacle, according to public statements and White House directives. He has advocated for a sculpture garden honoring figures he favors, pushed for patriotic performances tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary, and called for limits on certain performances and narratives he views as "woke." At the same time, his administration has reduced proposed funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reallocating some remaining funds to explicitly mandated projects.
Scholars and critics note that the present push is not without precedent. During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency and allied officials pursued a sustained campaign to shape how American culture was perceived abroad and at home. That campaign, which included covert funding of journals, exhibitions, orchestras and artists, sought to present an image of the United States as a guardian of highbrow culture while suppressing works that drew attention to American social and political ills, historians say.
Frances Stonor Saunders, whose book The Cultural Cold War documents the period, and other researchers point to archival memos and programs in which the U.S. government treated culture as an "operational weapon" against Soviet influence. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization created and funded secretly by the CIA, supported literary magazines, conferences and exhibitions that promoted styles and ideas the agency judged useful to U.S. foreign-policy aims. Internal proposals from the era argued that influencing the tastes of "educated and cultured classes" in Europe was an essential counter to Soviet propaganda.
Those efforts produced notable public cultural outcomes. The CIA-backed network promoted Abstract Expressionism as a symbol of artistic freedom in contrast to Soviet social realism, provided support to institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, and helped establish platforms that raised the international profiles of American artists and writers. At the same time, government actors discouraged or prevented the international circulation of art and writing that foregrounded racial injustice, labor exploitation or U.S. interventionism.
Researchers describe a pattern in which funding and access were conditioned on whether a work reinforced a curated narrative of American progress and innocence. Writers and artists who addressed systemic racism or criticized U.S. policy found themselves marginalized. James Baldwin and Richard Wright, both initially published in forums that benefited from government support when their work aligned with anti-Soviet themes, saw that support curtailed as their attention turned to domestic racial critique. W.E.B. Du Bois faced restrictions on international travel denied by the State Department.
The CIA’s influence extended to film and Hollywood scripts, according to declassified reports and memoirs. Internal communications from the 1950s record efforts by agency operatives to influence casting decisions and script content to avoid depictions that might feed anti-American narratives abroad. In one noted case, an agent sought to block a script for its implication that wealth in Texas was built on exploiting Mexican labor; the agent pledged to "see to it that it is killed." Other films that criticized American society or institutions were similarly targeted for suppression or sabotage.
Scholars argue that these Cold War interventions produced unintended, long-term effects on the national artistic ecosystem. Representational sculpture and other figurative forms were often associated with politics or with Soviet aesthetic categories during the era; conversely, abstract styles were promoted as emblematic of freedom. That dynamic, historians say, contributed to an imbalance in artistic development that persists — with fewer practitioners and institutions devoted to representational sculpture than would exist absent state influence.
The aesthetic preferences expressed by Trump — favoring heroic, literal, celebratory depictions of national history and public figures and excluding abstract or modernist approaches from some federally endorsed projects — mirror a different strand of 20th-century cultural politics: populist, nationalist aesthetics associated with figures such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy-era cultural conservatism prized straightforward, familiar imagery and often denounced what it considered elitist or subversive art.
Observers say the overlap between Cold War-era secrecy and present-day explicit policy is striking because both approaches operate on the premise that culture can be marshaled to serve geopolitical and domestic political ends. Where the CIA worked covertly to win hearts and minds abroad, the current administration’s interventions are overt and directed largely at domestic audiences and institutions.
Advocates for public arts funding warn that tying federal support too closely to narrowly defined political or aesthetic goals risks narrowing the range of voices and forms that receive institutional backing. Critics of government intervention in the arts also note that when funding becomes contingent on depictions that omit or minimize systemic problems, cultural institutions can be pressed to produce work that bolsters official narratives rather than interrogating them.
Administrations of both parties have historically used cultural policy to further broader diplomatic and domestic aims, but the form and transparency of that use have varied. In the 1950s and 1960s, much of the cultural campaign was secret and directed outward as part of a geopolitical competition. The contemporary turn is public and directed at domestic audiences, with explicit requests for patriotic programming and representational monuments.
Legal and policy debates are likely to follow. The scope of the Smithsonian review, conditions attached to federal grants, and decisions by major cultural institutions will shape whether the current priorities significantly alter programming, commissioning and exhibition practices. For historians and cultural critics, the episode is a reminder that choices about which artists and stories are elevated or sidelined can have lasting structural effects on the arts and the national conversation about history and identity.
As the government’s role in cultural life remains contested, scholars point out that the recurring pattern is not merely an argument about taste. It is a question about what public institutions exist to do: to curate a unified national image, to present contested histories, or to provide an open forum for a plurality of artistic expression. The answer will affect who gains resources and visibility in American culture for years to come.