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We all know President Trump’s aesthetics are terrible. The man has the very worst taste, slathering everything in gold, designing every building to be comically oversized.
But Trump’s taste, such as it is, doesn’t come out of nowhere. Wittingly or not, he has joined a long tradition of fascists imposing a grinding totalitarian aesthetic on the populace.
Trump’s personal imposition of his taste is a different story than that of the administration’s overall totalitarian aesthetic, which can best be described perhaps as “free tier AI image generator with the white supremacist dial turned to 11.”
That stuff is bad, but it isn’t really about Trump’s aesthetics as such. Rather, it’s the aesthetics of those folks agencies like ICE like to recruit. What better way to make sure you get virulently xenophobic groyper types to join Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown than by speaking their (visual) language.
Nor is this the same as Trump’s penchant for posting AI slop of himself. That, of course, ranges from the relatively low-key, like making him look thinner and younger thanks to some AI editing of an actual photo, to the pathetic, like his NFTs displaying him as Superman, a cool motorcycle dude, and whatever the futuristic glasses thing is supposed to be.
And of course there’s the genuinely unhinged AI slop, like a picture of himself as Jesus or a video of him in a fighter jet dumping poop on No Kings protesters.
This is Dear Leader stuff, to be sure, but this is far more about a crumbling, aging, soft-handed man who has never done a lick of actual work in his life, indulging in some fantasy of himself as a perfect specimen.
All of this slop is grotesque and dangerous, but it’s a bit separate from Trump’s attempts to remake the things we might group under the banner of “the fine arts” — architecture, sculpture, painting, and so on.
He’s trying to use those things to reshape the story of America, but the story he has to tell is cramped, stupid, and wrong — and it makes for terrible art.
If the jackboot fits …
It seems so facile to try to draw a line from Trump’s aesthetics to Hitler’s, but the fact is he shares Hitler’s fixation with classicism, a belief that he, like Hitler, is somehow the heir to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. He also shares Hitler’s fixation with burnishing not just his own image, but the image of an idealized country.
Trump’s artistic vision, such as it is, might get better reach if he had his own Leni Riefenstahl. She was a genuinely talented monster who became Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker extraordinaire, and without Riefenstahl, we really wouldn’t have gotten the full Nazi aesthetic.
“Triumph of the Will” is exactly the sort of film Trump would love to have made about him someday if any reputable, talented filmmaker were willing to sign on to such a project. Ostensibly marketed as a documentary, it was, of course, no such thing. Rather, it was a tightly coordinated photo opportunity without room for error.
In her classic 1975 essay about Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag was writing about the Nazi era, but she could be writing about Trump’s artistic vision today: “Fascist aesthetics … flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.”
Even Trump’s twin fascinations with combat sports and military marches, especially those staged just for him, like the military birthday bash last year and the UFC fight at Freedom 250 this year, stem from this same fascist wellspring. Sontag pointed out that “mass athletic demonstrations, a choreography and display of bodies, are a valued activity in all totalitarian countries.”
Part of Riefenstahl’s job was to make Hitler look good. Now, in our modern era, Trump is, likely much to his chagrin, unable to control how he is photographed, but he definitely controls how he is depicted.
Look at the banners he slapped up in DC, his giant visage glowering. In those banners, Trump is positively looming.
It’s not just that they are oversized, though that is its own fascist aesthetic writ, well, large. It’s also that he is being shot from below, much like Hitler was in “Triumph of the Will.”
As with Hitler, what you see from Trump is a sort of hyperrealism, but an incredibly boring one. He’s larger than life and everything he wants to erect is as well. The oversized ballroom, the oversized arch … even the statuary he wants to put up is wildly large.
In the run-up to Constitution Day, Trump demanded that the Smithsonian install an 11-foot statue of George Washington that he had recently displayed in his ridiculous Freedom 250 IndyCar race.
But that’s not all. He wants that to eventually be replaced by a 30-foot statue of the first president, and he wants the “Infinity” sculpture, an abstract masterpiece that has been there for over 50 years, taken away.
Why? His complaint is “that strange modernist sculpture tells visitors nothing about America, inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.”
Trump is, unwittingly, telling us a lot about himself in that sentence. First, why on earth does he think it tells visitors nothing about America?
The point of an abstract piece like Infinity is that it allows anyone, everyone, to see themselves, to see America, in it. That’s a far more open invitation, to far more people, than “giant animatronic George Washington” or whatever Trump envisions.
There’s a reason stuff like that is in theme parks, designed to amuse and educate children. It’s simplistic, it papers over all of the rough spots — chasms, really — in the American past, and tells a pat, heroic tale. But it’s not art, and it’s not history.
Trump even seems to be gearing up for his own “Degenerate Art”-style show someday.
After taking power, the Nazis purged German museums of anything they labeled “degenerate,” an amorphous category that scooped up 16,000 works of avant-garde and modern art, among others. Modern art, felt the Nazis, was tainted by Jewish and communist influence and was intended to weaken the good, pure, Aryan German society.
To really whip up some two-minute hate all across the country, the Nazis made an exhibit of the hated degenerate pieces and trucked them around, calling them “exhibitions of shame.” They later sold off works to collectors and dealers with the promise that funds would be used for German museums and not for war.
Spoiler alert: the funds were of course used for war.
It feels weird and hyperbolic to draw this parallel, but save for the fact that Trump hasn’t yet decided to send disfavored art to the hinterland to whip up white conservative anger, this feels a lot like his attempt to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Trump has tried to pull funding from the nation’s premier museum, and functionally forced out the head of the institution.
The National Park Service just announced it will be placing signage outside Smithsonian museums, particularly the National Museum of American History, to “warn” people that the museums are not telling the true story of America because “the leadership of the Smithsonian and NMAH have altered the museum’s role from accurately and coherently telling America’s story to using the museum as a tool to advance personal, radical ideologies.”
And then, of course, there’s the architecture. Trump is fixated on Corinthian-style columns, considered “the most luxurious in classical architecture.” This predates his election, as he’s used them on his own properties for decades. He wants to replace the Ionic columns at the White House entrance, all part of his efforts to turn the White House into the Trump House, now and forever.
Last year, Trump issued an executive order called “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” outlining his artistic vision for the District, one which literally boiled down to just “do more Greek and Roman stuff, please.”
There’s no real way to know if Trump genuinely loves Greek and Roman art and architecture or if he just thinks that is the kind of art that rich, cultured people like. Trump is the ultimate dumb man’s idea of a smart man, so it only makes sense he’d adopt the artistic worldview of a high schooler who is pretty sure he’s cooler than everyone else because he talks about Michelangelo’s “David” or some such.
In the end, there’s perhaps nothing more quintessentially artistically Trumpian than his fixation on Mount Rushmore.
His favorite presidents! No pesky non-realistic art to be found, just giant carvings slapped into the side of a granite slab, faces six stories high, plopped into the middle of land we stole. He’s even got toadies in Congress teeing up legislation to add him to the tableau.
And given that neither the conservatives on the Supreme Court or in Congress seem inclined to stop him, who’s to say we won’t have a fifth resident of Mount Rushmore before 2029?
A minor comfort? You know if this happens, Trump will do it on the cheap, sliding the got to some unqualified cronies or pals of Barron Trump or something. It’s gonna look even worse than all that AI slop Trump posts of himself, and we’ll dynamite it to oblivion the first chance we get.
That’s it for now
We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod this afternoon (featuring special guest Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News). There will be no special edition of the newsletter tomorrow, though I will be emailing free subscribers with a special offer as we approach Public Notice’s fifth anniversary next month.
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I don’t think comparison with Hitler are overblown.
I don't draw the same comparison to Hitler's treatment of the arts. I think trump has really bad taste. Look at his golf motels. They're just awful. Look at the Rose Garden. It looks like an enlarged motel patio in a place off the freeway exit. Look at where he eats lunch, or the omelette bar at Mar a lago. It's tasteless, it's soulless, it's artless, it's not creative at all. Look at his building in NY. It's architecturally simplistic. His NY home is covered in gold. The man has no taste.