This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Usually when we talk about the culture wars, we mean issues of sexuality, race, religion, and gender.

But as recent months have made plain,

when Donald Trump thinks about the culture wars, he also very distinctly means the arts.

Trump has very definite taste in what he likes to see and what repels him, too.

At the start of his second presidency, Trump fired the board of the Kennedy Center,

and now the Republicans would like to rename the building for him. His administration pressured

the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign, and they fired the National Archivist

and the Librarian of Congress. His attorneys are reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what

the president calls improper ideology. Now, one reading of all this is that culture makes an easy

target. It seems elite, and that all this is a deflection from the Epstein noise and the Ukraine war and the tariffs and so much else.

But my colleague Adam Gopnik believes this is a serious misreading.

Adam writes widely for the New Yorker about culture and history and much else, and we spoke last week.

What is the nature of this culture war in the second presidency?

Not just the details, but what is it aimed at doing?

What is it, what is it not?

You know, I can't speak for Trump's intentions,

and often I think we make a mistake in overreeding his intentionality and imagining that there's a scheme when there's simply a set of stimulus and responses that go on.

I think that there's this enormous sense, certainly around the people who he surrounds himself with, that they have been wounded

by American culture in some profound way.

And they've been lectured to by left-leaning university presidents and teachers and museum

...