Trump ousts head of the National Portrait Gallery

By The Associated Press
June 2, 2025 | 5:13 AM

President Donald Trump is terminating the head of the National Portrait Gallery, continuing his aggressive moves to reshape the federal government’s cultural institutions.

Trump announced Friday on his Truth Social platform that he was ousting Director Kim Sajet, calling her a “ highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.”

Sajet, a Dutch citizen raised in Australia, was appointed to the post in 2013 by President Barack Obama. She had previously served as president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Trump has repeatedly criticized the national network of museums and cultural centers as leftist and anti-American. Earlier this spring, he ousted the leadership of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, dismissing the chairman and president and replacing most of the board with loyalists, who then voted Trump the new chairman.

In early May, he abruptly dismissed Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

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