OPINION
The list of victims who have fallen foul of Trump 2.0 so far include 85,000 federal workers who are out of jobs, 14 million children left to starve literally overnight thanks to aid cuts and the dozens of towns and cities battling measles outbreaks, despite the disease being eliminated from the US in 2000, the same year Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me came out.
And now, Asian water dragons and clownfish and deer could be in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
All of them are in the National Zoo in Washington, and all of them are just a little bit queer – female water dragons can reproduce without males, clownfish change genders and there are nonbinary deer called velvet horns.
And now, all of them could face a dicey future, thanks to an executive order signed by Donald Trump in between breaks from drawing hearts in the White House atlas around Greenland in red texta.
Last week, the president issued an order instructing the US’ top cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian Museum and the National Zoo, to purge themselves of “improper ideology”. Specifically, Mr Trump’s order tasks his inane-grinner of a sidekick Vice President JD Vance to “restore truth and sanity” and to address the “corrosive ideology” that flourished during the Biden era.
A visitor looks at art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Picture: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/AFP
The National Zoo’s gay anteater couple Manny and Cayenne sadly died last year, meaning that zookeepers aren’t going to be forced to move them into different pens, each with a nice lady anteater because it’s probably just a phase.
(The question ‘How do you make an anteater straight?’ sounds like a children’s book written by Marjorie Taylor Green).
Vice President JD Vance tours the US military’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. Picture: Jim Watson/pool/AFP
Be scared.
Be very scared.
You know who really loved purging supposedly horribly bourgeois bastions of thought, four syllable words and overpriced gift shops of “improper ideology”?
The absolute who’s who of 20th century dictators.
Widespread crackdowns on museums and galleries and the weeding out of thought not aligned with the Dear Leader’s vision is straight out of Joseph Stalin’s Now That’s What I Call Authoritarianism, Volume One.
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with cleansing German galleries of “degenerate art”.
Adolf Hitler pictured in Munich in the spring of 1932. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images
And Elon Musk in 2025. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP
Mao Zedong’s bloody decade-long Cultural Revolution saw thousands of museums, galleries and libraries shuttered and millions of priceless works of art and historic artefacts burned or destroyed because the Chairman deemed them counter-revolutionary.
And North Korea’s various Kims?
You haven’t been able to pick up a 2B pencil and do some light sketching without official approval in triplicate for decades.
Mr Trump has now started down this same, fun path.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attending an opening ceremony for the National Defence Development. Picture: KCNA via KNS/AFP
Last week, he took a break from barking orders for all Spanish language programs to be defunded because no one should know how to pronounce ‘chiles rellenos’ better than him to complain bitterly about a new portrait of himself.
The study of the president had just been hung, by Republicans, in the Colorado state house but was, he argued, “purposefully distorted” and “truly the worst”.
The offending painting was nearly immediately removed.
Eliminating art work that you don’t personally like?
Ensuring all representation of you is properly propagandistic and ego-stroking?
Now that’s the sort of dictatorial imposing of oneself that someone like Saddam Hussein would have given an eager two thumbs up.
(They are also two men who would love a gold toilet).
US President Donald Trump has been VERY busy signing orders. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP
To get down to brass tacks: Mr Trump’s order translates to the erasure of one of the core principles and defining ideas – of freedom of expression and belief – that was enshrined by the founding fathers.
However, with one stroke of the pen, it feels like this is being undone faster than some White House intern can find enough Liquid Paper to remove the “improper” bits of the constitution.
It could not be more exquisitely, painfully ironic that the 250th anniversary of the drafting of the US constitution in 2027 will fall during Mr Trump’s term.
What would former US presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton think? Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP
This “improper ideology” executive order is part of Mr Trump’s wider push to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the US.
His argument is that in recent years, let’s say since Barack Obama took power in 2008, American freedom to say things like, ‘hey, was slavery THAT bad?’ or to openly fanboy about Himmler or to be opposed to the occasional drag queen hosting story time has been curtailed in what amounts to a crushing blow to free speech by the nasty left.
Former US President Barack Obama. Picture: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP
Less than two decades, you see, of government and business trying to marginally redress centuries of outright racism and discrimination against anyone who was not a white dude who just loved boobs and knew all the words to the Lord’s Prayer was a cruel imposition of groupthink on “normal” Americans who had been gagged by the coastal elites.
This “improper ideology” executive order and his anti-DEI drive are trying simply to get things back to “sanity”. You know, when it was fine to spend your weekends idolising Southern generals who loved putting down uprisings of enslaved people.
The White House’s anti-DEI campaign is nearly comically bonkers, having outright banned or disappeared hundreds of supposedly problematic words from government websites including “women”, “feminism”, “belong”, “status”, “sex”, “expression” and “gay”.
This has translated into the Department of Defence removing its website page dedicated to the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Well, that’s really going to pose a problem for the USS Gloria Steinem then, isn’t it?
These sorts of Trumpian correctives are set to keep on coming.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, 168 Confederate symbols and statues were removed.
Back then, in a matter of months, the world stopped celebrating men who thought it was just tops that human beings with a different skin colour could be their legal chattel.
People raise their fists as they march during an event in remembrance of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Picture: Kerem Yucel/AFP
A statue of Christopher Columbus, which was toppled to the ground by protesters, is loaded onto a truck. Picture: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images/AFP
And so off all those bronze Jeffersons and Jebs were sent to, what I’m imagining, was a truly cursed storage facility.
Now, thanks to Mr Trump’s “improper ideology” order, these statutes look set to be restored to public spaces.
Mr Trump is already pulling other moves out of Stalin’s Greatest Hits collection. The moustachioed Communist loved nothing more than a good borscht and disappearing dissident thinkers in the night.
In a not that far-off vein, in recent weeks, nearly a dozen students and academics have been detained by federal agents and flown all around the country, including PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk. The government sent six plainclothes officers to physically restrain and take her in.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents. Picture: AP
Protesters gather during a hearing with lawyers for Rumeysa Ozturk. Picture: AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi
So too have hundreds of students had their visas revoked for having entirely legally protested against the war in Gaza last year.
Also, more than 50 universities are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination for supposedly excluding white and Asian American students.
In this climate, what chance do clown fish and Asian water dragons and deers have, who have committed no greater crime than simply being themselves? How long until this is designated as “improper” and “sanity” is returned and zoos can only stock rigidly straight animals?
Now, does anyone know where a fed up aquarium keeper might be able to get their hands on a copy of Plankton Playboy?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Leave a Reply