FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—President Donald Trump has fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, citing her history of pushing woke ideology, donating to Democrats, and denigrating Republicans, a White House official told The Daily Signal.
Kim Sajet has donated $3,982.40 to Democrats, including Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the DCCC, and EMILY’s List, an organization that helps pro-abortion Democratic candidates win elections.
Sajet has also donated to Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy McGrath, Jaime Harrison, Sara Gideon, Kamala Harris, and Colin Allred through ActBlue.
Trump announced he fired Sajet on TruthSocial on Friday. Her ouster closely follows the firings of the Librarian of Congress, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the U.S. Coast Guard commandant over similar concerns of wokeness.
“She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of [diversity, equity, and inclusion], which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly,” the president said of the Nigeria-born Australian native, who is a citizen of the Netherlands.
The photo of Trump in the Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., curated by Sajet, has the following caption: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”
Yet Sajet told The Washingtonian magazine the gallery tries not to editorialize in captions.
“We try very much not to editorialize,” Sajet said. “I don’t want, by reading the label, to get a sense of what the curator’s opinion is about that person. I want someone reading the label to understand that it’s based on historical fact.”
In 2018, Sajet wrote an editorial in The Atlantic revealing her support for critical race theory.
“To step outside of comfort zones and be confronted and uncomfortably reminded—that the ‘portrait of America’ has never been only about meritocracy, but also social access, racial inequality, gender difference, religious preference, and political power,” Sajet wrote.
“As we approach Columbus Day, increasingly being recognized as a day of Indigenous lamentation that prophetically coincides with the 50th anniversary of this museum’s opening in 1968; we need to remember that we did not ‘find’ a ‘New World’ but invaded an old one,” she continued, “We aren’t just a world leader, but a global participant, and in the end as we enter this world with nothing, and leave this world with nothing—it’s what we do in the middle that counts.”
When Sajet joined the Portrait Gallery in 2013, she made it her mission to spend 50% of all money spent on art to support diverse artists and portrait subjects, USA Today wrote in 2019.
“Sajet says white men dominated famous portraits because they owned land, and art was historically reserved for the rich and elite,” the reporter, Nicquel Terry Ellis, said.
In an article in The New Yorker, Sajet sought to gloss over the dark past of Planned Parenthood founder and known eugenics enthusiast, Margaret Sanger.
When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, attempted to get Sanger’s portrait removed from the Portrait Gallery, Sajet said: “There are bad guys; we know what they’ve done,” Sajet said. “Margaret Sanger is being demonized for a lot of things she didn’t do.”
Sajet said Sanger was “not perfect,” nor was she a “eugenicist leader.”
The now former Portrait Gallery director wrote a blog post in 2018 “explaining why traditional portraiture has been so non-diverse.”
She tweeted about “opening a dialogue about culturally constructed racism” at the Portrait Gallery.
