ArcaMax

Let me count the ways.

Donald Trump excels at broadsides against bright places and people that burnish our world.

But now, it's getting personal.

Trump is stealing what I hold dear. I'm not even speaking of press freedom or his suing CBS News, where I loved my first job.

I mean the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump fired the librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, and the Kennedy Center president, Deborah Rutter.

Call them Washington's greatest cultural assets. Each woman lost her high post in a short email overnight.

"Carla ... thank you for your service."

Shabby.

I've known Dr. Hayden for years, from when I covered the library beat at the Baltimore Sun. She directed the city's Enoch Pratt Free Library. And I'd never dare call her Carla.

Baltimore is a literary city, more than most know. Novelist Anne Tyler lives there; so did Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Dr. Hayden has rare dignity and made the library more in the swim, with live music on late Thursdays. She elevated the book shop to accent the gorgeous structure facing the Capitol.

She became a librarian of the people, appointed by Barack Obama in 2016. That -- and the color of her skin -- may have done her in.

Still, it's the Library of Congress. No congressional leaders had a say. None were happy with Trump's swift push into their domain.

When has Trump cracked a book, and what does he care about the grand Library?

Raw power and unresolved anger at accomplished women leaders are hardly hidden here.

If Trump asked, he'd hear the library began with Thomas Jefferson's books. Jefferson sold his library to Congress after the British burned the Capitol.

Dr. Hayden cut a glam figure around town as time went on, sporting cool sneakers at the National Book Festival, giving interviews.

I did a double take when we crossed paths at a reception. She told me about presenting the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to Joni Mitchell.

She still lives in Baltimore, she said. I liked that she felt at home in the humbler city cast in Washington's shadow.

Dr. Hayden established her career in Chicago, as did Rutter, who ran the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before arriving in 2014.

Here's another place Trump seldom went. The Kennedy Center reached a new level of excellence and diversity under her wand: opera, ballet, theater, symphony and a free open concert daily.

Rutter also built the "Reach" expansion. The center celebrated Pride Month in June. Inclusion made her mark.

No more. Trump fired Rutter, known on the world stage, and the board of directors. The board's bipartisan tradition is gone. So is its chairman, the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein.

The symphony on Thursdays lit my life amid the strife. I'll still go, but a spirit is snuffed out. Patrons don't like politics running roughshod over the arts. An usher told me there is a drop in audience size already.

Trump is also taking the spark and fizz out of major institutions of note: the National Institutes of Health, and Harvard University.

I grew up with my doctor dad talking about NIH almost as a familiar houseguest.

And yes, I briefly breathed in bracing Cambridge autumn air. America's oldest university remains one of a kind. The Oval ranter resents its refusal to obey his furious demands.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was shuttered abruptly. Was it because Wilson was a Democrat? Who knows.

I spent several months there working on a biography, soaking in the camaraderie, comparing notes in a fun mix of minds.

Next, the U.S. Postal Service is in the Constitution, with Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster.

Don't let Trump take away this precious civic connection between all of us.

Yet he bleats about privatizing the post office.

Trump has no heart for how many people, programs and agencies he cuts and butchers. More than 100,000 federal workers and researchers are out the door.

Last, there's one thing that breaks my heart. He plans to take the Lincoln penny away. The greatest president erased as coin of the realm by the one dead last.

Reader, is nothing sacred?

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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