Why Is Trump Mad at the Zoo?

The order came down late in the evening, when the orangutans, lions, and crocodiles would be resting. The next morning, March 28, the animals awoke to a new political reality: The world’s most powerful man had taken an acute interest in their place of lodging, the National Zoo. President Donald Trump had directed Vice President J. D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian Institution of all “improper ideology.” As a ward of the Smithsonian, the zoo was not only covered by this mandate; it was specifically mentioned as one of the facilities to be cleansed of wrongthink.

Trump’s order leaves little mystery about what he wants changed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and its National Museum of African American History and Culture. It calls for the removal of “divisive,” “race-centered ideology” from those museums, and says that their exhibits should instead instill pride “in the hearts of all Americans.” But the order’s text is silent on the nature of the zoo’s ideological transgressions, and my email to the White House asking what they might be went unanswered. Trump has not previously been counted among the zoo’s critics, who tend to lament the life of captivity suffered by its animals, not their potential indoctrination.

I reached out to the zoo staff to ask if they knew what the administration wanted changed. When I did not immediately hear back, I decided to visit the zoo, in the mindset of a freshly appointed cultural commissar. One morning this week, I arrived at its Connecticut Avenue entrance. Pollen-coated cars were lined up outside, and blossoms on the zoo’s magnolias were turning themselves inside out in the clear morning sun. Just a few hundred yards down its central path, near the Asia Trail, a food truck was already serving cocktails.

[From the July 1919 issue: Pessimism and the zoo]

On my way over to the zoo, I’d read the institution’s most recent strategic plan. In the introduction, former National Zoo Director Steven Monfort says that by going from a global population of 1 billion to 8 billion in only 200 years, “humans have made things very hard for wildlife.” It occurred to me that Vance might find this characterization a touch too Malthusian; he has often railed against what he perceives as anti-natalism in liberal culture. But the sight of parents carrying Moscow mules and margaritas away from the food truck suggested family-friendliness, at least of a certain kind.

At the zoo’s newly renovated Bird House, I joined a long line of families clustered around strollers, waiting to be let into the aviaries. In 2023, I’d met the zoo’s chief curator for birds, Sara Hallager, while reporting a story about the institution’s decision to euthanize a fox that may have killed 25 of its flamingoes. Hallager had told me that after the renovation, the zoo would no longer acquire birds from Africa, Asia, or South America. Its new exhibits would showcase only North American birds. Now I wondered: With this “America First” approach, had the zoo intended to obey (way) in advance? If so, that might explain why an enormous pink-marble sculpture of an eagle—salvaged from the original Penn Station—had been placed near the Bird House entrance.

As I moved deeper into the exhibit, this theory seemed less plausible. Its interpretive panels were not overtly political—I searched high and low for land acknowledgments and found none—but they also didn’t seem to have been designed to please Trump. For one thing, they’re printed in English and Spanish, a first for the zoo. They also celebrate the ability of migrating birds to move freely among the Amazon rainforest, North America, and the High Arctic.

I did find one potentially “divisive” panel in the turkey enclosure. It drew a distinction between North America’s Indigenous people, who hunted turkeys for thousands of years but took care not to wipe them out, and European colonists, who in just two centuries drove the birds to the brink of extinction. This may not be the sort of sentiment that “instills pride in the heart” of Americans. And yet it’s true.

[Read: The aftermath of a mass slaughter at the zoo]

Everywhere I went, I heard kids buzzing about the zoo’s new star attractions, two pandas named Bao Li and Qing Bao that Xi Jinping had sent from China as a gesture of friendship. A source at the Smithsonian Institution who was not authorized to speak to the press told me that before the pandas went on public view, the zoo had been besieged with messages from senators requesting advance meet and greets. I briefly entertained the thought that the zoo had ended up in Trump’s crosshairs because some key ally of his had been denied a picture with the bears. Whatever the case, Bao Li himself seemed entirely indifferent to politics. He sat, lolled back against a green hillside, chewing through whole sticks of bamboo like they were Twizzlers at the movies.

The zoo features less explicit climate advocacy than you might expect from an institution devoted to animal conservation. Most of it is concentrated in a single room in the Amazonia building. The Trump administration has been relentless about scrubbing government websites of all mentions of climate change, no matter how anodyne, but this was gentle stuff. In the center of a large mural from the 1990s recommending solar power, a kid wearing baggy clothes—now back in fashion—picks up trash in a forest. No fossil-fuel multinationals are named and shamed in the surrounding panels. The staff members in green vests did not appear to be indoctrinating anyone. They just gamely answered questions about the neon-blue tree frogs in a nearby terrarium.

The exit from Amazonia dumped me out onto a path that runs along the zoo’s southern edge. Traffic noise wafted down from the Duke Ellington Bridge, reminding me that I was not in a rainforest, but in the middle of Washington, D.C.—a city that Trump has derided as a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.” Continuing down the path, I arrived at the Kids’ Farm exhibit, a shining scene of rural Americana that would not have been out of place on a butter label. Near the big red barn and stables, toddlers were perched on a fence, petting mules. A cow’s blotchy black coat shimmered in the bright heat of the afternoon. Like the Bootheel BBQ & Southern Catering food truck parked nearby, which promised to “feed your Southern soul,” the exhibit seemed designed to flatter, not antagonize, a narrow and nostalgic view of “real America.”

Before leaving the zoo, I popped into the visitor’s center. I confirmed that the bookstore inside was aimed at the nonpartisan animal lover, not the activist, and learned that the zoo usually holds a secular-coded celebration of Easter—its focus is nature’s post-winter bounty, not the newly risen Christ. The zoo’s website calendar does show that last year, and for several years prior, it also recognized International Family Equality Day. Local LGTBQ organizations participated in the event, and some described it as “Gay Day at the Zoo.” As part of the festivities, guests were able to watch a beaver or seal eat rainbow-dyed ice cake. Last year’s event also had a musical performance featuring themes of “climate justice, inclusion, queer identity, and community.” When I emailed the zoo to ask whether International Family Equality Day would continue this year, I did not receive a reply.

I could see how this celebration might inflame a social conservative, but the tame, one-day event did not seem like enough to merit the zoo’s inclusion in the executive order. Nor did any of the other things that I’d found—unless the administration is taking a “broken windows” approach to policing ideology.

Then again, I can’t claim that my audit was exhaustive. I had intended to visit every exhibit, but I ended up skipping the Reptile House. Not for lack of interest; it’s actually one of my favorite places at the zoo—the pythons and unblinking crocodiles provide a real encounter with the animal other. But the line was very long, with little shade. And so I can’t tell you for certain that the Reptile House isn’t a hotbed of critical race theory, or other MAGA heresies. Vance and his team will have to find out and let us know.