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Why can’t corporate media get Trump’s trail of destruction right? [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-06-02
President Donald Trump just fired Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, and despite this being the umpteenth time he’s fired someone without the authority to do so, corporate media has still given him a pass.
Take the Washington Post, for example. Right in the subhead it says, “It was unclear if Trump can dismiss Smithsonian leaders.”
And here’s Politico doing the same thing: “It is not immediately clear if the president can dismiss the gallery’s director.”
And, of course, we can’t forget about The New York Times, which said, “It was unclear if the president had legal grounds to fire the director, experts said, because the National Portrait Gallery is part of the Smithsonian Institution, which is independent of the federal government despite receiving nearly two-thirds of its budget from Congress.”
How could someone possibly learn what type of institution the Smithsonian is and why Trump can’t reach his grubby, racist paws in there and fire people?
The Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian museum being targeted by President Donald Trump.
I guess they’d have to visit the Smithsonian’s website itself to learn about the institution’s clearly independent legal history.
“The Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency and does not exercise regulatory powers, except over its own buildings and grounds. Thus, courts have held that the Smithsonian is not an agency or authority of the Government as those terms are used in certain laws applicable to executive branch agencies such as the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act,” its website says.
It’s fair to say that the legal status of independent entities like the Smithsonian can be confusing. And if Trump hadn’t already tried—and failed—to dismantle the U.S. Institute of Peace, perhaps the level of grace being extended here might be appropriate. But it’s obvious by now that Trump doesn’t believe there are any restrictions on his power, so the media’s chin-stroking over the lack of clarity here is ridiculous.
The Washington Post also characterized the firing of Sajet as “the president’s first action” against the Smithsonian, which is just flat out wrong. Trump issued his executive order taking aim at the Smithsonian more than two months ago. The order is not subtle, saying that the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
It also specifically names three Smithsonian museums—the American Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the American Women’s History Museum—and calls out a specific exhibit that Trump doesn’t like, the American Art Museum’s "The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.”
The order also gave JD Vance the power to remove anything that he believes to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” which is just Trump code for “please remove anything that might make a racist white person sad.”
Trump is engaged in an all-out racist war against U.S. cultural institutions, hoping to remake them in his own image, and he doesn’t care if the law gets in the way. Corporate media and everyone else knows this, so there’s no reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
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