President Donald Trump said he was sacking the longtime director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, on Friday, ending the 12-year tenure of the first woman to serve as the gallery’s director.
“Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am herby (sic) terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery. She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday afternoon.
It is not immediately clear if the president can dismiss the gallery’s director. The National Portrait Gallery, which was founded by Congress in 1962, operates under the purview of the Smithsonian Institution. According to its website, the Smithsonian is funded through a mix of public and private money, with federal funding making up 62 percent of its backing.
The museum houses over 23,000 works of art, most famously a collection of presidential portraits, called “America’s Presidents,” displayed in an exhibit that is a tourist magnet in downtown Washington.
A White House spokesperson responded to a request for comment with a list of articles purporting to show Sajet’s connection to Democrats and progressivism, and did not immediately respond to a follow-up question on the president’s authority to fire her. The gallery did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move comes after the president dispatched Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education centers and other entities, tasking his second-in-command with erasing all “divisive narratives,” including about the history of systemic racism in America, in a March 27 executive order.
Central to Trump’s directive was the instruction to remove all “race-centered ideologies” — which the administration has slammed as an effort to “rewrite history” and marginalize white people — and anything recognizing the achievements of trans people as part of the yet-to-be-built American Women’s History Museum, which is all part of the president’s push to eradicate evidence of progressive ideas from Washington.
Prior to her appointment as the gallery’s director, Sajet served as president and CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vice president and deputy director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and director of corporate relations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sajet, who was first tapped to lead the gallery in 2013, is just the latest casualty of Trump’s effort to reshape the arts in Washington.
The president in February purged the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center — the city’s premier theater and cultural center — and proclaimed himself the organization’s new chair, while denouncing it for having “become too woke.”
Shortly thereafter, Trump tapped longtime loyalist Richard Grenell as interim executive director of the institution and added a slate of conservative allies to its board — including multiple Fox News personalities — ushering in a new era of sweeping change for the city’s iconic cultural center.
