For the past 96 days, a huge tarp has hung over the facade of the Kennedy Center, a fitting symbol of Donald Trump’s assault on Washington’s cultural institutions.

Those attacks intensified on Wednesday with the announcement that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is preparing to place a series of signs at the entrance to the National Museum of American History (NMAH) warning visitors about the “personal viewpoints” of those who curate its exhibitions. The White House accuses the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian network, of having “explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage” U.S. citizens.

Once installed, the signs, priced at $7,000 apiece, will join the tarp at the Kennedy Center as symbols of Trump’s determination to turn culture into a vehicle for advancing his MAGA agenda, burnishing his legacy and feeding his ego.

The tarp is a relic of the battle over Trump’s move to add his name to the Kennedy Center. A board of Trump loyalists had approved the name change, but in June, a judge ordered that the giant letters be removed. Dozens gathered to watch in person while tens of thousands followed online, expecting to see the white facade revealed once more. But the tarp never came down.

On Tuesday, the board voted, during a meeting that witnesses said ended with Trump shouting, to proceed with the closure of the institution that the president first announced in February. At the time, he argued that the center required a complete reconstruction because it was “tired, broken, and dilapidated.” Now, after the White House released a video apparently showing part of the grand foyer ceiling collapsing, Trump is threatening to withhold approval for the $257 million renovation unless the institution once again displays his name alongside that of John F. Kennedy, the president in whose honor the center opened in 1971.

On Wednesday, with the Kennedy Center closed since the previous afternoon, a new symbol had been added to the growing list of evidence of Trump’s cultural crusade: barriers workers erected around the institution to block access to the complex on the banks of the Potomac.

The latest chapter in the saga comes less than 50 days before the midterm elections. Polls suggest voters would rather see Trump focused on issues such as inflation and gasoline prices than on the skirmishes of his culture war.

‘Ideological cleansing’

It also comes just a week after Lonnie Bunch III, president of the Smithsonian Institution, announced his resignation. He cited personal reasons, but his departure followed a year and a half of pressure from the Trump administration on the Smithsonian network of 21 national museums and a zoo. The White House set its sights on the institution in March last year with an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which called for what critics described as an “ideological cleansing” of the Smithsonian.

Days after Bunch’s departure, Trump, who had already successfully pushed the National Portrait Gallery to alter how it presented him, ordered the Smithsonian to replace Infinity (1967), José de Rivera’s abstract sculpture outside the National Museum of American History, with a 10-meter-tall statue of George Washington.

In an unprecedented blurring of the roles of president and museum curator, Trump also demanded in a social media post that the institution mount an exhibition devoted to the first U.S. president and keep it on display for “five years.”

Beyond its artistic value, Infinity is a symbol of Washington’s modernization. It was the first work of modern sculpture to break into the then overwhelmingly neoclassical landscape of the National Mall, an aesthetic Trump has repeatedly sought to revive.

Nor is it the only piece of public art in the capital to make political headlines in recent days. The order to dismantle and remove Joel Shapiro’s Blue (2019) from the plaza outside the Kennedy Center earlier this month provided yet another example of the president’s hostility toward modern and contemporary art.

The warnings that Burgum is preparing to place at the entrance to the NMAH stem from a 160-page report, complete with 500 footnotes, released on July 4, the nation’s 250th birthday. Its anonymous authors accused the museum of focusing too heavily on the Founding Fathers’ contradictions, slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. They also faulted it for presenting an unflattering account of Christianity’s role in the nation’s founding and for engaging in activism “against white people” and in favor of transgender people and “illegal” immigrants.

In a phone interview, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, a public historian at American University in Washington, described the White House report as “ridiculous and absurd” and Trump’s attacks on cultural institutions as “classic authoritarian tactics.” “In the Smithsonian’s case, they also show ignorance about how it functions,” she added.

“NMAH exhibitions host an immense range of ideological viewpoints,” the expert said. “And during their development they undergo multiple peer reviews and consultations with communities and stakeholders. They are never at the whim of curators, who, moreover, are historians of the highest caliber who leave positions at prestigious universities to serve the public.”

Rymsza-Pawlowska also rejected the need for an exhibition about Washington. “There is already a museum entirely dedicated to him, Mount Vernon, a twenty-minute drive away,” she noted.

She also trusts that NMAH visitors will understand how much of Trump’s attacks are “political pantomime.” For regulars of the Kennedy Center — an institution with which many of the city’s music lovers have almost emotional ties — it is already too late.

Shortly after returning to the White House, Trump moved to put the center at the service of MAGA ideals. He dismissed its board, installed himself as chairman and replaced members with loyalists with no experience in cultural management or philanthropy. He then added his own name to the center’s. And when boos during visits by Trump and members of his administration, together with artist boycotts, subscriber cancellations and falling ticket sales, compounded the turmoil, he concluded that the institution should be shut down for a sweeping renovation, one he now says depends on the courts ruling in his favor.

Toni Codinas, one of such patron, says that over these 18 months he has felt, in order, “incredulity,” “anger” and “sadness.” Incredulity “at how easily he took control of the center” with “brazen disregard for norms and a politics of faits accomplis.” Anger when he turned it “into a MAGA party venue and an example of his administration’s rampant corruption, using the opera to screen Melania’s documentary or to throw a FIFA party [for the World Cup draw].”

The sadness, says Codinas, a board member of the Washington Bach Consort, stems from seeing how Trump “has pummeled the remnants” of the Kennedy Center, whose facade remains shrouded, 96 days later, by a giant tarp that stands as a reminder of Trump’s attacks on the capital’s cultural institution.

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Kevin Warsh has been chair of the Federal Reserve for just four months, but this Wednesday will be remembered as the day he showed that he and his fellow governors, not outside forces, are the ones truly steering U.S. monetary policy. The Fed has done exactly what U.S. President Donald Trump did not want it to do under any circumstances: raise interest rates just six weeks before the midterm elections, in which Republicans risk losing control of Congress.

With this move, Warsh, a conservative billionaire appointed by Trump, has shown that he is serious about his commitment to fighting inflation, even if it means harming the electoral interests of the man who chose him in the belief that he would comply with his desire to make the United States the country with the lowest interest rates in the world. That has not been the case.

The increase is modest, at 25 basis points. The federal funds rate now stands in a range of 3.75% to 4%. But it is a powerful signal: it is the first rate hike in more than three years. The last came in July 2023. With this decision, Warsh’s Fed is underscoring its determination to bring inflation under control after more than five years in which prices have failed to move anywhere near the central bank’s 2% target.

The decision was also unanimous, ending a year marked by dissenting votes among members of the Board of Governors. That unanimity lends additional weight to the move and strengthens the Fed’s position against the criticism it is almost certain to face. One of the loudest critics is likely to be Trump. On Tuesday, he attacked the Supreme Court, particularly the three conservative justices he appointed during his first term, for ruling against his attempt to alter mail-in voting rules just weeks before the November 3 election. The three justices defied him, and now Jerome Powell’s successor, another Trump appointee, has done the same. Powell, too, eventually became a frequent target of Trump’s attacks.

Another significant takeaway is that Fed officials do not expect this to be the last increase. All but two members of the Board of Governors believe interest rates will need to rise again before the end of the year. Four policymakers anticipate two additional increases, according to the Fed’s latest projections. Warsh, who is reluctant to offer markets guidance about future decisions, does not participate in that forecasting exercise.

The Fed justified its move in a statement arguing that economic activity continues to expand at a solid pace despite heightened uncertainty, partly driven by geopolitical developments. “Job gains have kept pace with the workforce, and the unemployment rate has changed little. Inflation remains elevated. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2% goal. The Committee will deliver price stability,” the statement said.

The rate hike came as no surprise to economists or to financial markets. Warsh had already signaled such a move at the Jackson Hole symposium in August. At the time, he said: “It’s the Fed’s job to make sure that inflation expectations do not get unanchored. […] We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do. That’s our job.”

A few days later, inflation data appeared to vindicate those arguing that the U.S. economy needed some cooling. Employment figures remain strong, but consumer prices in August held stubbornly at 3.4%, still a long way from the Fed’s 2% objective.

Trump’s threats

In recent days, Trump has escalated his attacks on the Fed, whose independence from the executive branch has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The president warned that unless interest rates were cut sharply, he would move to halt a significant portion of U.S. trade.

“LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT, which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ridiculous and very costly Tariff decision, strongly acknowledged ‘the President’ has an absolute right to do,” Trump said in a rambling post on his social media platform, Truth Social. Later that day, speaking from the Oval Office, he complained that other countries enjoyed lower borrowing costs than the United States and called on the Fed “to be patriots.”

Meanwhile, the war in Iran, which shows no signs of a near-term resolution, and the widening conflict involving Yemen’s Houthi rebels have kept oil prices above $100 a barrel, pushing up gasoline prices in the United States and threatening to fuel further inflationary pressures.

Before Friday’s decision, several analysts had warned that if Warsh wanted to preserve the Fed’s credibility as an institution capable of acting free from political interference, he had little choice but to raise rates. Doing otherwise might have pleased Trump and perhaps provided a modest boost to long-term growth prospects, but it would have pushed the goal of bringing inflation under control further out of reach and, above all, dealt a serious blow to the central bank’s independence.

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Neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca, 44, holds up a transparent vial filled with tiny white spheres floating in liquid. Each one is a cortical organoid, a millimetre-scale replica of the part of the brain responsible for complex thought, language and the mystery of the human mind. Pasca’s team implanted these seeds into the brains of mice that had been genetically altered so they would not develop a cerebral cortex of their own. The experiment, unique in the world, has produced healthy animals with brains that are an integrated blend of human and mouse. These animals contain more transplanted human neurons than any others ever born, the scientist tells EL PAÍS.

For the first time, these animals make it possible to investigate “features of the human brain that until now were inaccessible,” says Pasca, a physician and researcher at Stanford University in the United States. Specifically, they allow scientists to study the human neurons most characteristic of our species at the molecular and cellular level within a living organism, rather than in a cadaver sample or a laboratory cell culture, as has been the case until now. Pasca, who was born in Romania, believes the advance paves the way for new treatments for autism, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy and dementia. In the future, he says, it may be possible to create a mouse with a cerebral cortex made from an individual patient’s own neurons.

The details of the experiment, published on Wednesday in Nature, read like science fiction. It begins with skin cells taken from healthy volunteers. Scientists apply a cocktail of proteins that reprograms the cells back to an embryonic state, when they can become any tissue in the body. The cells are then guided to develop into the type of stem cells that give rise to neurons in the cerebral cortex, eventually forming organoids: the tiny white spheres with a three-dimensional structure that Pasca displays during the video interview.

In earlier experiments, the same team successfully implanted human neurons into the brains of rats and used laser light to influence their behavior. Growth, however, was limited by the lack of space inside the skull, as human neurons are much larger than those of rodents. Pasca had also shown that organoids from different regions of the brain can be created and fused together, like pieces of a living puzzle.

These spheres, each containing hundreds of thousands of human neurons, are implanted into the mice two days after birth. They then begin to grow, become vascularized and connect with the rest of the mouse brain, which controls functions such as sensory processing and movement. Because the animals lack their own cerebral cortex, the human neurons expand to make up more than 90% of the cortex and roughly half of the mice’s entire brain. Timing is crucial: this window of “plasticity,” during which the cells can integrate with their host, closes about two weeks after implantation.

The cerebral cortex that develops in these mice is comparable to that of a human fetus in the sixth month of gestation, Pasca explains, although there are important differences. At that stage, the human brain already contains more than 16 billion neurons, whereas the modified mice have around four million such cells in their cortex. A normal mouse brain, by contrast, contains about 14 million neurons, because its neurons are much smaller. What exists inside the brains of these engineered animals is not exactly a human cerebral cortex, as some cell types are still missing and neither the structure nor the size is fully equivalent. Even so, Pasca argues that it provides an invaluable model for studying our “most inaccessible organ.”

Cerebral palsy

In a proof-of-concept experiment, the researchers cut off the oxygen supply to the brains of their humanized mice. Ordinary mice are remarkably resistant to this kind of injury, whereas in humans even a brief period of oxygen deprivation can result in lifelong cerebral palsy.

The lesions observed in the animals with humanized brains resemble those seen in patients with cerebral palsy, a condition that affects around 18 million people worldwide. The team argues that these mice make it possible, for the first time, to study the effects of these currently irreversible injuries in a living brain, and perhaps even to identify ways of treating them.

In 2024, Pasca’s team implanted human brain organoids derived from the cells of a child with Timothy syndrome — a rare genetic disorder associated with severe autism and epileptic seizures — into rats. The work enabled the researchers to develop a genetic therapy that reversed the condition in the implanted animals. Pasca says the team plans to begin testing the treatment in humans in a clinical trial later this year or early next year.

Garikoitz Lerma-Usabiaga, an Ikerbasque researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in San Sebastián, contributed to the study by characterizing the brain’s microstructure using diffusion MRI. This technique measures the movement of water molecules to determine tissue organization and map neuronal pathways. “The technique finds that water molecules prefer to travel in the direction from the human organoid to the mouse brain, suggesting connectivity between the two,” the neuroscientist explains.

The researchers were in for another surprise. These mice generated a type of neuron that had never before been isolated in a living organism: Von Economo neurons, a rare class of neural cell first described in 1925. Initially thought to exist only in humans, they were later identified in primates and in other mammals with large, complex brains, including elephants, whales and dolphins.

These neurons are found in regions of the cortex associated with social behavior and decision-making, and their premature degeneration is a hallmark of frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease that appears between the ages of 40 and 60.

The researchers believe these unusually large neurons may have emerged in the humanized mouse brains because, for the first time, they had sufficient space to develop. Their presence could now provide a valuable platform for testing treatments for the disease.

Despite having a cortex made up of human neurons, these animals do not behave very differently from ordinary mice, Pasca says. If anything, they are slightly slower in tests of memory and reflexes, because the connection between the human and mouse components of the brain “is not perfect.” That is due to the fact that the two species have been evolving separately for more than 70 million years.

Ethical issues

The outcome would likely be very different if these human organoids were implanted into monkeys, something that should not be done for ethical reasons, according to Pasca. Before carrying out the mouse experiments, his team submitted the project to an independent oversight panel made up of bioethicists, lawyers, evolutionary biologists, patient advocates and philosophers, all of whom approved the work.

“It is a very delicate subject, and it is easy for misunderstandings to arise if we do not convey the nuances well,” says Pasca, who argues against replicating this experiment in apes: “In species closer to us, human neurons would have much more space to grow, and integration would be much better. I think we should be very cautious about this kind of experiment and not carry them out unless there is a very clear justification.”

Daniel Tornero, head of the Stem Cell and Brain Injury Laboratory at the University of Barcelona, is well acquainted with Pasca’s work and describes it as “incredible.” “Psychiatric illnesses are the hardest to model because mice do not suffer them, and their cerebral cortex is much smaller,” he explains. “This new work is interesting because it allows you to model human diseases with human cells.”

In 2019, a Chinese team that included the Spanish biologist Juan Carlos Izpisua created the first human-monkey chimera: a macaque implanted with stem cells derived from humans. The aim was to explore whether animals could one day be used to grow human organs for transplantation. The term chimera comes from the fire-breathing creature of Greek mythology, with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a dragon’s tail.

For Tornero, the animals created by Pasca are also chimeras, although the Stanford researcher is careful to avoid the term, perhaps to steer clear of controversy. Tornero notes that it is difficult to know whether there is anything human in the behavior or thought of these mice.

“Human neurons send axons [projections] into the mouse brain, but there is not enough data yet to know whether those connections are superior,” he says.

The possibility is not purely theoretical. In 2013, a research team demonstrated, on a much smaller scale, that injecting 300,000 human glial cells, which provide support and immune protection in the brain, into mice could enhance their cognitive abilities. The modified rodents had better memory and learned faster than normal ones.

For now, however, these new animal models can only be used to study disorders that arise during embryonic development. Human neurons grow about 20 times more slowly than those of mice. Even if one of these animals lived to the age of two, the upper limit of a mouse’s lifespan and roughly equivalent to old age in humans, its cerebral cortex would still resemble that of a two-year-old child.

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