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.