President Donald Trump’s conflict on American establishments rolled on Thursday with a brand new casualty: the librarian of Congress.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” it learn, in response to The New York Occasions. “Thank you for your service.”
Hayden, appointed in 2016 by former President Barack Obama, oversaw the library by Trump’s first time period and at one level even interviewed now-Vice President JD Vance about his now-controversial e book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Her removing is very jarring given how not often the Library of Congress adjustments management. Hayden was its first new head since 1987. Earlier than that, she spent many years in Chicago’s library system, rising from librarian to chief.
The backlash was swift. Home Minority Chief Hakeem Jeffries issued a press release on Friday the place he known as her dismissal “a disgrace,” and described Hayden as “accomplished, principled, and distinguished.”
Home Minority Chief Hakeem Jeffries
Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the highest Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, echoed the outrage, calling Hayden “a guardian of truth” and demanding her instant reinstatement.
The firing is emblematic of Trump’s second time period. Since returning to the White Home, he’s moved aggressively to claim management over America’s cultural establishments—gutting the Kennedy Middle, attacking elite universities, rewriting historical past, and launching a full-scale conflict on DEI.
In March, the administration was caught erasing a reference to Jackie Robinson, the primary Black man to play Main League Baseball and a former Military lieutenant, from the Division of Protection web site.
Associated | Inside Trump’s racist campaign to erase American heroes from US historical past
On the precise, “woke” has develop into a racial canine whistle sometimes invoked when Black folks or girls seem in locations they weren’t anticipated. Hayden’s very presence, it appears, was a provocation.
It’s not the primary time she’s confronted GOP hostility. As president of the American Library Affiliation, she clashed with the George W. Bush administration over the Patriot Act’s growth of presidency surveillance—an episode Republicans raised throughout her 2016 affirmation listening to.
When she was first nominated, Hayden known as the library a “treasure chest” and spoke of creating it extra inclusive.
“Being the first female and the first African American really brings together two aspects of, of course, my life that make this even more significant, I think, in terms of how people view the future of libraries and what a national library can be,” Hayden mentioned. “It’s inclusive. It can be a part of everyone’s story.”
Hayden didn’t simply lead the establishment—she modernized it. And now she’s the newest sufferer of Trump’s endless tradition conflict.
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