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Miami Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Trump's new attack on DEI: Erasing history or a needed shakeup?
Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. MELINDA: I'm calling the weekend I just spent at my Notre Dame class reunion a Mary-thon, because I got to catch up with so many Marys — Mary Virginia, Mary Ann, Mary Meg and Mary Pat, plus that outlier Kathleen Marie. But while we were closing down the dance floor, Donald Trump did not take a minute off from trying to close down free expression, distort history and put the arts in a headlock. Oh wait, did I say that wrong? A news story I read about his possibly illegal Friday firing of the director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery said he was 'continuing his aggressive moves to reshape the federal government's cultural institutions.' You say 'reshape,' I say 'deform.' Art that is told what to be and do isn't art anymore. DAVID: I spent some time recently in Omaha's fabulous art museum, the Joslyn. Like the Smithsonian museums, it is free and a place of beauty and inspiration. At the same time, if you spend any of your visit reading the descriptions of the works, the monotony of the standard-issue Marxism from the artists is tedious. I've felt the same from the National Portrait Gallery and other Smithsonian art museums. It wouldn't hurt them to have some fresh blood from outside the usual suspects. MELINDA: Fresh blood? Trump said Kim Sajet is out as director of the Portrait Gallery because she's a 'highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.' An inappropriately partisan person is just someone who doesn't agree with him. I mean, would he ever throw out one of his own supporters on that basis? On the contrary, he makes no secret of filling positions based not on expertise but on loyalty to him and on the way they look on television. And isn't DEI just fairness by another name? This president has got things so upside down that any job not held by a white man is now assumed to be held by a know-nothing 'DEI hire,' instead of by someone who had to work even harder to get where he or she is. DAVID: No, DEI is not the same as fairness or equality. It is right there in the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' Equity is the idea that people shouldn't be treated equally because they are not equal. It is the very opposite of the imperfectly achieved American creed that so many fought to finally make a reality in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Today, more than 90% of Americans agree on 'equal opportunity.' DEI tears down that hard-won consensus and replaces it with a raw racial spoils system and identity politics. Equity will never enjoy that kind of support. MELINDA: Look, the college friends I was just with and love so much are mostly white Catholic girls who are grandmas now. But we are keenly aware not only of all we were so lucky to have had, but of what a lack of diversity in our classrooms cost not just those who weren't there but us, too. Sajet is out because she once told The New York Times that the portraits in the gallery mostly represent 'the wealthy, the pale and the male.' I would not have put it that way, but no one can say it isn't true. Why not include more portraits of those who should have been there all along but were overlooked? And do you really agree with Trump that museums are hotbeds of anti-American propaganda? A confident country is not afraid to tell its whole story. Knowing more will not make us fall apart, and concealing unpretty parts of the past is what authoritarians do. Though if he succeeds, this current moment will certainly wind up as a blank page. The reason people flock to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is that a lot of us know that what we learned about that history in school was subpar, to put it generously, and we are eager to change that. Unless this administration really is driven by racial animus, what's the problem? DAVID: The DEI-mania in the years since the murder of George Floyd may have sometimes brought needed attention to the darker parts of our history, but more often than not it has turned into fact-free America hatred. The bits of The 1619 Project that turn up in the Smithsonian's generally wonderful Museum of African-American History are particularly rancid. No, modern policing was not borne of the need to recapture escaped slaves. Policing has a history that goes back thousands of years across many cultures. No, American capitalism is not rooted in slavery. The most economically advanced parts of America rejected slavery first. No, the Revolutionary War was not fought to keep British abolitionists at bay. MELINDA: I'd hardly call it a mania, and there have been more police shootings every year since Floyd's murder. You'd rather fact-check the 1619 Project than talk about Trump's determination to stoke white grievance — white genocide, really? You are right about those 1619 errors, which did a lot of damage. Only Trump isn't trying to correct, but to obliterate. Just like DOGE preferred counterproductive mass firings to the more targeted trims that everyone could have supported. And fact-free American hatred, huh-uh. I love this country, which is why a year ago right now I was in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, as proud of all of those veterans who saved the world from the Nazis, and especially of our local recipient of the French Legion of Honor Medal — France's highest honor, civil or military — as I could have been without having my heart burst out of my chest. I also love our people who come from everywhere, and who look and think differently from me, too. Unlike the president, who on every holiday posts pretty much the identical festive message about what scum half of all Americans are. I just want us to tell our whole story, like you'd want for the health of your family. To airbrush is to propagandize, and what does that get us? What's so scary about a museum director trying to make the portraits hanging in our national portrait gallery better represent the whole American story? I can't wait to see what kind of 'improper ideology' JD Vance will uncover at the National Zoo, as he's supposed to be doing across all of the Smithsonian. Maybe he will find that the new pandas or some other immigrant animals are up to no good. DAVID: I love the National Zoo, but it is not the place to go if you want to learn the nuances of environmental policy. You don't get delicate shades of green — you get hit with a moss sledgehammer. We might agree that Trump is not going to add subtlety, but the place is in need of a shakeup. The Smithsonian doesn't do nuance well, but nuance is what we need to showcase our common humanity and common problems. You are right that there have been more police shootings since Floyd's death, but it might be wise to dwell on the fact that every year police kill more unarmed white people than Black people. The police killings are best addressed in ways that bring us together as equality already does. The DEI approach of only looking at Black killings leaves us divided. MELINDA: I took my kids to that zoo all the time and noticed very little environmental policy, nuanced or otherwise, but then I was just trying to keep my son from jumping in with the cheetahs. You'd expect police shootings to kill more white than Black people since the latter make up only about 15% of the population. Trump's DOJ is not even going to look at police misconduct, which is a good way to get more of what you have decided not to see. But it isn't only the abuse of Black people that he wants to ignore. He also mothballed a federal database tracking all misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. How turning a blind eye to wrongdoing might bring us together I don't know. That's never been his goal. And this Portrait Gallery director's firing is only one example of this administration's non-stop efforts to disappear all but MAGA-approved history. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring civil rights icons, starting with assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, a Navy vet himself, and one of the country's first openly gay elected officials. Happy Pride Month! Others on the list include Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Medgar Evers, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. You can call all of this anti-DEI, or you can hear Trump raving about 'dead white farmers' in South Africa and realize that the man's racial views, and our willingness to accept them, are exactly what 1619 was talking about. When only the pale and the male and the straight are acceptable, then that's in-your-face white supremacy. When Trump replaced those who ran the Smithsonian's Kennedy Center, which he sometimes mistakenly calls the Lincoln Center — I sense a cognitive cover-up in the making here — they were replaced by folks who were not at all partisan. You know, because the new KenCen board he put in place had the nonpartisan good taste to immediately elect Trump as chairman. After installing himself to run this cultural gem, he according to The New York Times told his new team that as a kid, he could pick out notes on a piano and impressed someone his father had hired to assess his potential strengths with his inate musicality. 'I have a high aptitude for music. Can you believe that?' Yes! White House communications director Steven Cheung answered a question about this revelation by calling his boss a 'virtuoso' whose musical choices 'represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.' Sadly, the president said, he was never encouraged to develop his talent. But I say it's never too late to pursue a gift like that on a full-time basis. C'mon, Juilliard, help us out here. DAVID: If you keep talking Trump, all we're going to do is agree. Let me just say this: As offensive as the blatherings of the sycophants around Trump obviously are, so is the uniform liberalism of the Smithsonian. It paints America through red-colored glasses when there are so many other colors to see. A few years of Trumpy chaos might just inject some needed diversity of thinking to the place. That's part of DEI, too, right?
Miami Herald
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
What Biden's prostate cancer reveals about Trumpworld
Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. Read what the writers have to say about launching this new column. MELINDA: My family was in New York this past weekend, honoring the memory of my brother-in-law, and while we were walking in Central Park, talking about Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis, my husband asked me why I had always been so pro-Joe, anyway. I started talking about some of the things Biden had done in office and he stopped me, and said he thought there had to be more to it than his infrastructure bill or even that he got millions more low-income kids fed over the summer. He wasn't wrong: What really made me stick, I think, has been Biden's long record of personal kindness — of reaching out to the grieving and the abused and the ill. Sure, doing so helped heal his own terrible losses. But without not just his ambition but also this care for others, his life, too, would have been over a long time ago, even if he had kept right on walking around. DAVID: Did all that kindness blur some of the other things about him? MELINDA: Did my respect for his compassion blind me to his infirmity? Yes, it did. I continue to believe he was the best president of my lifetime. But at one point, I watched White House reporters screaming at him about his age and acuity and did exactly what I believe Trump voters do, which is feel even more protective of him as a result, no matter how justified the attack. So am I steaming now about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book about Biden's decline? No; let it all come out. That's never the wrong answer no matter who we're talking about. DAVID: I agree with you there. The cover-up from the top of the White House down, aided and abetted by members of the Cabinet and Congress has to go up there in the firmament of all-time worst abuses of power, don't you think? MELINDA: No. People never stopped yammering about his age and how he was hiding in his basement. He should not have tried to run again, but those around him, while I'm sure loving proximity to power, also loved his elderly behind. Look at the contrast between how Biden has spent his life and how this current crowd spends theirs. Just like Elon Musk, they see empathy as weakness. That's why it's no surprise at all that the response to Biden's diagnosis among many in Trumpworld has been anything but gracious. Donald Trump, Jr. posted this on X: 'What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???' There are only four stages of prostate cancer, but I quibble. At the memorial for my gentle brother-in-law, Chris Turque, every one of us told stories about his kindnesses — large, small, and most of all consistent. A woman Zooming in from a train in France said how much his respect for women in the newsroom and inquiries about her well-being after terror attacks in Paris meant to her. A former classmate dialing in from Israel said that when he was the new kid and feeling out of place at their junior high, it was Chris who had become his first friend. I honestly couldn't hear what the Australian who'd gotten up in the middle of the night to be part of remembering Chris said, but here's what I say: We tend to think of changing the world as curing cancer, and Joe's cancer moonshot program tried to do that, too. But never let anybody tell you that 'simple' acts of humanity aren't a legacy to be proud of, because they are. DAVID: I, too, have been looking to the past and thinking about kindness this week. Today I am putting down my 12-year-old boxer, Metaxa. Those who know have showered me and my family with kindness. The wonderfulness of a family dog is indescribable. My 10-year-old son has never come into our house without being told by a bouncing ball of fur that his arrival is the single best moment of the day. Now the best thing I can do is reward those years of slobbery, stupid love and kindness with a lethal injection. I am broken apart. MELINDA: That is terrible about your Metaxa, and I am so sorry. If anything happened to my handsome and valiant grandpup Joey — a rescue not named for Biden, by the way — I would not be OK. DAVID: With a politician, even one as humane as Biden surely is, there is a bigger package. The kindness, as authentic as it may be, comes with an eye to how history will remember President Joe. And recall, that Biden has seen himself as a man of history for my whole life. I was in onesies when he was elected to the Senate and not far out of middle school when he first ran for president. MELINDA: Does his longevity and the ambition that every one of our presidents has got to have to get to the White House somehow negate the good he did along the way? DAVID: No, but all the years of kindness to families facing cancer, to the widows of American soldiers coming to receive remains at Delaware's Dover, to victims of hurricanes, floods and earthquakes need an asterisk. It is Biden's kindness, bent by ambition, that led him to look the other way when his drug-addled son Hunter launched a multimillion-dollar career selling access to Joe. The country paid a price, even if Hunter was absolved. Later, it was kindness, bent by ambition, that led those around Joe to hide his infirmities from the nation. No one set out to do something wrong. Nobody thought, 'Boy, the rubes in flyover country will never know the truth.' They were trying to protect Joe first, but also, maybe more than a little, their own power and careers. Kindness is wonderful, but it can also be powerful bad when mixed with other, less positive, aspects of humanity. Kindness or not, I don't think it is wrong to look at Joe's cancer and smell another cover-up. It is only natural. MELINDA: Would I be thunderstruck to learn that the timing of the cancer announcement might have something to do with batting down Tapper and Thompson's book? No, I would not. But the disrespect is still both sexist and ghoulish — Dr. Jill, hahaha. I can hardly breathe from the hilarity. It's no different than when Paul Pelosi had his head beaten in by an intruder in 2022 and the reprehensible response from so many on the right was to laugh and invent an imaginary gay assignation. On that sad occasion, Junior retweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer, captioned, 'Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.' A lot of things are 'natural' that we could do without, like revenge, blood lust, greed, grabbing women, lying just to keep your skills up, and the big, beautiful corruption that you yourself have written about so well, David. What comes naturally to this president is not the impulse to for whatever reason try to make someone else's day better, but the 'come and sit by me' affinity for every reprobate from Pete Rose, who acknowledged having sex with a minor he said he believed to be 16 at the time, to the J6 rioters who beat Capitol Police officers, to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to be cut into little pieces. In Riyadh last week, Trump called this miserable assassin an 'incredible man,' a 'gentleman,' and said, 'I like him too much, that's why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much!' On this we agree. That Donald Trump does not even want to come across as a decent person is new for an American president, and there is no doubt that this contrast has heightened my appreciation for Joe Biden. That does not mean we should grant immunity to everyone who is not weirdly praising the world's most repressive dictators, and then eagerly taking lessons from them. For a long time, Trump has been trying to get us to grade what right and wrong look like on a curve, and he's succeeding. DAVID: You are so right about the grading on a curve. Trump's misdeeds far outclass — let me rephrase because Trump is the opposite of 'class.' Most of the time Trump's misdeeds dwarf the sins of his Democratic predecessors, but, as I have written about the Clintons: More often than not, where Trump lays down a four-lane highway of sin, a Clinton, a Biden or an Obama blazed the trail. For earth-shatteringly consequential lies, Trump knows no equal, but Barack Obama's lie that you could keep your insurance after Obamacare was passed was pretty darn big. For family-focused corruption, Jared Kushner's $2 billion investment deal with the Saudi's that you described so well, has to be a record but it is clearly the louder echo of Hunter Biden's millions from Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen. For sleazy gifts, Trump's $400 million plane has to set a new standard, but I doubt he would have been creative enough to come up with the scam without Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state. She set new records padding the coffers of the Clinton Foundation with foreign money. MELINDA: David, you know that no previous bad behavior justifies the betrayals of who we are as a country by Trump and someone who thinks that habeas corpus means 'Trump can do whatever he wants' in Latin. When do we start holding the people we personally have voted for to account? DAVID. Trump has certainly gone further than anything Democrats have done and now he has produced a supporting cast that magnify his worst instincts while he gives license to their own. That's new, for sure. You're right, somehow we have to find a way to stop looking back and demand better from our own politicians. But in 2028 when a Democrat is elected president and in 2029 when the first scandal breaks out, I doubt Democrats will fail to note that Trump did worse. I think the decent majority of Americans agree with you, but the unfortunate fact is that it is the most partisan among us who have the loudest voices in politics.
