The painting, the president and the woman who dared to say no

As a budding art historian, Kim Sajet could hardly have imagined that one day she’d come up against the fury of the president of the United States. But when Donald Trump returned to power last year, primed for his war on “woke”, among his primary targets was America’s grand Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network, with collections covering art, science, history and culture. His opening strike was against the Melbourne-raised Sajet, then director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the first woman in the role since the gallery was founded in 1962.

Trump wanted her gone. He called her “highly partisan” and “a strong supporter” of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Vice President JD Vance, with typical eloquence, branded her a “left-wing crazy person”. Among the reasons for their displeasure were that Sajet had donated to the Democrats in the past, and in 2016 had rejected a pro-Trump portrait by New York artist Julian Raven. The painting, titled Unafraid and Unashamed , was exceedingly kitsch and ridiculously large: 5 metres wide, 2.5 metres tall, and weighing 113 kilograms. According to Raven, Sajet told him it was “no good”. It seems a fair judgment.

When I meet Sajet on a video call in late July, the Trumpian badgering is happening all over again, this time to another Smithsonian director.

“It feels like the longest week in history,” Sajet tells me. She’s been watching her former colleague, Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History (also the first woman in that role), being grilled on Capitol Hill. The spectacle has inevitably stirred up unpleasant memories. While the MAGA mob has lavished special attention on Sajet and Hartig, the Smithsonian leadership as a whole has been denounced by the Trump administration as being captured by a “radical, activist ideology”.

Sajet didn’t attend Hartig’s congressional hearing in person: “I just watched [online], like the rest of us with incredulity.” She hadn’t faced Congress herself – she was simply “fired” by Trump in a post on Truth Social in May last year (in reality, he had no authority to do so).

These extraordinary experiences have made her uniquely placed as a keynote speaker at the upcoming International Congress of Maritime Museums in Sydney. Her topic, fittingly, is courageous leadership. Daryl Karp, the director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum, points to Sajet’s “exceptional mix of global museum leadership, bold thinking and a powerful commitment to opening cultural institutions to the communities they serve” as the reason she was chosen to address the congress.

As it happens, Trump wasn’t able to fire Sajet but the political pressure was so intense that she chose to walk away for the sake of the institution and its staff. “I wanted to see if we could just take me out of the story, because no one institution is represented by a single individual,” she says. “I was fairly confident that I could get another job, and I believed that it would defuse the situation.”

Sajet is now director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, a position she has held since September last year.