The first woman and African American to serve as the US librarian of Congress before Donald Trump fired her in May has not heard from the president’s administration beyond the 31-word email it sent her with word of her dismissal, she has revealed in her first interview since her ouster.
“No one has talked to me directly at all from the White House,” Carla Hayden says in an interview airing on the upcoming CBS News Sunday Morning. “I’ve received no communication directly, except for that one email.
“That’s the only communication.”
Hayden’s comments to the CBS national correspondent Robert Costa provide a first-hand glimpse at the unceremonious way she was fired from a post to which the US Senate confirmed her in 2016.
She had been thrust under political pressure by a conservative advocacy group that had pledged to drive out anyone deemed to be standing in the way of the Trump White House’s rightwing agenda. That organization, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), leveled accusations against Hayden and other library leaders that they had promoted children’s books with “radical content” as well as literature by opponents of the president.
Hayden then received an email on 8 May that read: “Carla, 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. Thank you for your service.”
Asked by Acosta whether her tenure really ended “with one missive that’s electronic”, Hayden replied: “That was it.”
She also remarked: “I was never notified beforehand and after.”
Hayden is one of numerous federal government officials whom Trump has dismissed upon having been convinced that they were not aligned with his second presidency’s plans. Just hours before her firing became public, the AAF used its X account to insult her as “woke” and “anti-Trump”.
“It’s time to get her OUT,” the AAF also said on X, in part.
Congressional Democrats reacted with fury to Hayden’s termination. New York’s Chuck Schumer, the top US Senate Democrat, said Hayden was a “trailblazer, a scholar and a public servant of the highest order”.
The New York representative Joseph Morelle, the highest-ranking Democrat on the US House’s administration committee, called Hayden “an American hero”.
“Hayden has spent her entire career serving people – from helping kids learn to read to protecting some of our nation’s most precious treasures,” said Morelle, whose committee oversees the congressional library.
The Library of Congress sits across from the US Capitol in Washington DC. It holds a vast collection of the US’s books and history, making it available to federal lawmakers as well as the public.
It archives the papers of presidents and supreme court justices and has collections of rare books, images, music and artifacts.
In 2022, Hayden arranged for the singer Lizzo to play one of those artifacts: a flute owned by James Madison, who was US president from 1809 to 1817.
