Andrew Weinstein, Trump’s Campaign to Defund the Arts—and Rewrite History, Time, 24 October 2025
October is National Arts n Humanities Month, a time normally reserved for celebrating the creative and intellectual currents that enrich our nation. But this year, the month began not with a celebration, but with a shutdown, the latest and most jarring blow in the Trump Administration’s long-running war against American culture.
In August 2017, I and 15 of my colleagues on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made a not so difficult choice. In the wake of President Trump’s shocking refusal to unequivocally condemn the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, we resigned. We wrote to the president that his support for hate groups and the false equivalencies he pushed could not stand. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” our letter stated. “Your values are not American values.”