Skip to main content
The Morning Star Shop
Will Chinese pandas be next for deportation?
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Us President Donald Trump waves to supporters from his limousine as he arrives at Trump International Golf Club, March 29, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Florida

OBVIOUSLY, the pandas will be next. They are Chinese, and therefore communists. They are currently embedded in the National Zoo in Washington, DC, posing an obvious threat to national security in the heart of the nation’s capital. We will doubtless see them on the deportation list in the coming days.
 
Such a scenario may sound preposterously far-fetched, but the zoo, part of the Smithsonian Institution, is the latest on the Trump administration’s target of subversive entities ripe for purging. It would seem that human immigrants are not the only threat to Trumpian autocracy.
 
The zoo was named, along with the many museums that form part of the Smithsonian and line the capitol’s National Mall, in the latest executive order issued from the White House.
 
Under “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Trump is cracking down on what he sees as the “anti-American ideology” on display at the nation’s cultural institutions, which he accuses of diminishing “American greatness.” The Smithsonian, according to Trump, has come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
 
Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, a champion of the false narrative that white Americans are discriminated against, has been tasked with personally singling out centres that display what the White House terms “improper ideology” as if anything beyond taking tea out of fine china is tantamount to revolution.
 
It’s not exactly clear how the more than 2,100 animals housed at the zoo, including the Chinese pandas, Bao Li and Qing Bao, have sought to subvert US history.
 
What “race-centered ideology” is actually code for is daring to put on display the country’s brutal racist and colonialist history. This has made the Mall’s newest museum, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Trump’s prime target. It is the only national museum devoted exclusively to documenting African-American life, history, and culture.
 
“We need folks — and not just black folks — to defend the National Museum of African-American History and Culture when JD comes for pretty much everything in it, just because it tells the truth,” wrote Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African-American Policy Forum. “Block their entrance. Make a scene. Force him to admit he’s a Confederate.”
 
According to Keith Boykin, a black author and national political commentator: “The new executive order attacks a national museum for interrogating institutional racism,” Boykin reported in an online video. “The horror! Imagine a museum in a country founded on slavery and segregation having the audacity to explore the history of racism.” Trump, he went on, “thinks that the only way we can celebrate American greatness is by whitewashing history and erasing the legacy of racism.” All of this, says Boykin, is to “convince his white Maga supporters that he’s sticking it to the coloureds.”
 
Maryland’s African-American governor, Wes Moore, the only black governor in the country, lambasted the Trump order. “Loving your country does not mean lying about its history,” Moore said. That history should instead be celebrated, he said, “flaws and all.”
 
Patricia Eguino, a Latina who ran for the Washington DC Council last year and protested alone against a procession of the far-right Proud Boys on Trump’s inauguration day in January, warned that the order was one more piece of evidence “of Trump’s seething racism” and that “it’s time to stop living in denial. We are free-falling into fascism with no parachute.”
 
The attack on the Smithsonian, which boasts some of the most visited museums in the world, comes on the heels of Trump’s coup at the Kennedy Centre, the music and entertainment enclave that has occupied the banks of the Potomac River since it opened in 1971.
 
In February, Trump fired the Kennedy Centre leadership and loaded the board with philistine cronies while crowing that it now had a new and “amazing chairman, DONALD J TRUMP!” Trump has threatened to “straighten out” the Kennedy Centre and its cultural choices, a term he apparently meant literally, citing “drag shows” as the first to go. Trump vowed to hand pick the next set of Kennedy Centre honourees, naming a long-dead baseball player, Babe Ruth, as his top choice.
 
The coup ensured that the Kennedy Centre’s social impact team, which was in place to ensure diverse representation and “to advance justice and equity in all that we do,” was the next to go. They were all fired last Thursday.
 
Before the axe fell, the team’s artistic director, renowned black playwright Marc Bemuthi Joseph, recorded a video from his office, as he stripped art and posters from his walls. “Basically, I am taking down everything black in my office, just as the new leadership of the Kennedy Centre is doing its best to disavow much of the literal colour that has made this place special,” he said before the door was locked behind him.
 
As a result, what was once arguably the country’s most prestigious cultural centre, home to concerts, operas, plays and musicals, is now struggling financially as numerous artists and acts have cancelled bookings there and audience members are threatening to boycott the venue.
 
Entrance to all the Smithsonian museums as well as the National Zoo is free to the public, although that could now change as Trump and Vance purge exhibits and personnel. The bigger question remains whether ultimately, the museums themselves will even exist.
 
“The National Museum of African American History and Culture is one of the best museums I’ve ever encountered,” said Joe Guinan, president of the Democracy Collaborative, an action-oriented think tank in Washington, DC. “Its story about the intertwining of slavery, capitalism, and America is essential to understanding this country. Which is why Trump is attacking it.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
A firefighter calls out his colleagues at the scene of an explosion in a residence compound in northern Tehran, Iran, June 13, 2025
Features / 25 June 2025
25 June 2025

Protesters at the US embassy saw history about to repeat itself as US-Israeli efforts for regime change in Iran recall the disastrous war in Iraq, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER 

PSC demo 21.6.25
Features / 22 June 2025
22 June 2025

LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports from London’s massive demonstration, where Iranian flags joined Palestinian banners and protesters warned of the dangers of escalation by the US, only hours before a fresh phase of the war began

Supporters of Kneecap's Liam Og O Hannaidh outside Westminster Magistrates' Court in London, where he is appearing charged with a terrorism offence, June 18, 2025
Features / 19 June 2025
19 June 2025

Thousands rallied for the Irish rapper charged with a terror offence, singled out by the pro-Israel Establishment for taking the cause of Palestine on stage and to a mass audience, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER from Westminster Magistrates’ Court

People taking part in a demonstration organised by the Palestinian Youth Movement Britain near the Israeli embassy in London, in protest against the escalating aggression in the middle east following the Israeli air strikes against Iran, June 13, 2025
Features / 18 June 2025
18 June 2025

LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports from Parliament Square, where a rally slammed the hypocrisy of allowing Israel to bomb Iran and kill hundreds to stop it developing nuclear weapons — the same weapons Israel secretly has and refuses to explain

Similar stories
COURAGE OF CONVICTIONS: Democratic Congressman for Texas Al
Features / 12 March 2025
12 March 2025
Student Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and threatened deportation are terrifying — but the moribund Democrats are still failing to mount any meaningful resistance against the slide toward autocracy, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
US President Donald Trump (left) watches as Reverend Mariann
Features / 24 January 2025
24 January 2025
The words of compassion by Bishop Budde were ‘a lesson in moral leadership and courage that our government would do well to listen to,’ says Jeremy Corbyn. LINDA PENTZ GUNTER has more on the sermon heard around the world
Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance take
Features / 4 September 2024
4 September 2024
JD Vance’s bitterly misjudged ‘childless cat ladies’ broadside broke the internet — but lightweight, bizarre or even downright dangerous vice-presidential picks are the norm for Republicans, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
THE COMMON TOUCH: Vance poses for photos with kitchen staff
Features / 5 August 2024
5 August 2024
The controversial senator’s meteoric rise shows us how the ruling class and its media will always reward those who repackage working-class struggles as personal failings, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY