Trump’s Assault On Culture Is About To Go Full Throttle, A La Hitler
The direction of the nation’s art and culture will be manipulated by a president who worships Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, says his favorite movie is about a martial arts warrior and has a $20,000, six-foot tall, gaudy painting of his younger, fantasy self in tennis whites hung at the entrance to his Mar-a-Lago faux palace.
The rise of trump portends a time of suppression of disagreement and those who disagree with the administration. The onslaught against the culture of the left will not come suddenly but rather it will be a slow but steady push. The victims will be like the frog in the water who knows it is getting hotter but refuses to act until it is too late and he dies in the boiling water.
The pot will be regulated not just by the government but also by all those who support trump and his plans. Censorship may come voluntarily from billionaires who are beholden to trump for government contracts and approvals, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, owner of X and the richest man in the world.
There will be difficult times ahead if trump’s taste in art is a forecast of how he will try to shape the cultural landscape. Trump’s taste in music and books is predictably misogynous. A recent report on a playlist at Mar-a-Lago included Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds”; James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World”; Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”; and the Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Trump has said his two favorite books are, no surprise, two of his own, “The Art of the Deal” and “Surviving at the Top.” He has nearly 100 pieces of artwork hanging at Mar-a-Lago but his favorite must be that idealized reflection of himself.
Trump has long shown his plebeian taste in the arts. An example is his gaudy gold-gilded Trump Tower which was built in 1982 at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. Trump had promised to preserve two valuable sculptures while workers demolished the old Bonwit teller, luxury department store, to make way for the new skyscraper.
Trump had agreed to donate the sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum the sculptures. They included two limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing and a six-by-nine meter, geometric-patterned bronze latticework that hung over the entrance.
Trump, however, ordered the artwork destroyed, claiming it was not worth the delay in construction.
In 2020, shortly before leaving office, trump signed a resolution “to make federal buildings beautiful again” and ordered that new buildings costing more than $50 million must be designed and built to reflect classical styles
The order was condemned by groups like the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The order singled out landmarks like the Federal Building in San Francisco, designed by the noted architect, Thom Mayne, winner of the prestigious Rome Prize in 1987 and the Pritzker Prize in 2005.
Trump’s order also noted the federal Courthouse in Salt Lake City by Thomas Phifer, winner of the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Another building that was included for criticism was the George C. Young U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building Annex in Orlando, Fla., designed by Heery International, the worldwide architecture, interior design, engineering, construction management, program.
Trump’s order noted that such “deconstructivist” architecture may impress “the architectural elite,” but that classic design would please the general public.
In a similar fashion, Nazi architecture was promoted from 1933 until its fall in 1945. It was characterized by the designs of Albert Speer to evoke simplicity, uniformity, monumentality, solidity and eternity,” which is how the Nazi Party wanted to appear.
Trump would probably have been happy to have Arno Breker and Josef Thorak to help with his vision of federal art. Breker was a German sculptor best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, where they were endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art. “Die Partei,” Breker’s statue representing the spirit of the Nazi Party, flanked one side of the carriage entrance to Albert Speer’s new Reich Chancellery.
Thorak became known for oversize monumental sculptures, particularly of male figures, and was one of the most prominent sculptors of the Third Reich.
Soon after he took office, President Joe Biden reversed trump’s educt about making federal buildings beautiful again.
The far right trump world will put a creative squeeze on artists and organizations that need government aid to produce their art, especially documentaries on social issues like race, immigration or reproductive rights. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio and the National Endowment of the Arts are identified as targets for suppression and funding cuts in the Project 2025 blueprint for the trump reign.
Lia Holland, the Campaigns and Communications director for Fight for the Future, which advocates for online speech, expressed concern that creators could self-censor their projects for fear of offending the government.
“Our biggest concerns are intimidation for creators and journalists and really anybody who’s engaged in creating media or storytelling that might run counter to the preferences of the incoming administration because [the Trump campaign has] obviously expressed interest in taking revenge on enemies or otherwise threatening or creating material consequences for people to resist their narrative,” Holland said.
Music, literature and art have long served as lifelines and avenues for political resistance and with some notable exceptions, artists of all mediums have in the past opposed authoritarians and fascists.
Authoritarians and fascists require conformity, suppression of dissent and thought control, the opposite of artists. These demands collide with the core qualities of the artist, including critical thinking, introspection, free thought and empathy.
Authoritarians dehumanize while artists revel in love and loss, beauty and injustice. Authoritarians seek to control and stifle expression, a clear affront to the artistic creativity.
Artists often have the ability to predict and express the future, especially when the clouds of repression are growing. They often try to warn the frog in the water to escape before the water boils.
Hitler knew that he had to control the cultural narrative if he was to rule Germany. Artists were persecuted and their works were banned because they made “Degenerate Art” which did not favorably represent the Fuhrer and his plans.
The German-born painter George Grosz risked his life when he alerted Germany of the dangers of aggressive nationalism and Hitler. He painted one of his earliest works in 1923, 16 years before the war began. The painting, “Hitler the Savior,” mocks Hitler as a Teutonic warrior in a tunic. His 1927, anti-fascist painting, “Shut Up and Do Your Duty,” shows Jesus nailed to the cross wearing combat boots and a gas mask.
Most Germans considered Grosz’s anti-Nazi work to be offensive to Christianity and the growing extremism. At one time in the early 1930s, Grosz found someone had left an iron pipe at his front door with a note attached. “This is for you, you old Jew-Pig, if you keep going with what you’re doing.”
Grosz fled Germany for the U.S. in March 1933, two months after Hitler was crowned Fuhrer. The artist found that most Americans did not understand his art as a precursor to the coming Nazi persecution. By the time Americans realized Grosz had been right, it was too late. The frogs had died.
Then, as now, many Americans welcome authoritarian rule and are sick of the promises of liberal thinking which they consider to be sluggish and overbearing. Americans now, just as Germans in the 1930s, are seeking clear policies, stability, comfort and conformity and not the probing intellectuality of art. And they are seeking art to reaffirm their own feelings of cultural superiority.
As Grosz pointed to the coming fascism, Pablo Picasso also
illuminated the coming horrors of fascism. Picasso used his brush and canvas in 1937 to depict the Nazi and Italian attack on the Basque city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The masterful work reflects the unbearable agony, atrocities and destruction rent through bombings over the course of three hours, which destroyed three-quarters of the ancient town, killing and wounding hundreds. The painting symbolizes the wider fight against fascism.
“In Guernica, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death,” wrote Picasso. “I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”
Art curator Juan Manuel Bonets said that before 1936, neither Picasso nor the expressionist painter and sculptor Joan Miró were very political.
“But the Spanish Civil War changed this,” Bonets said. “Later on in their careers, Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and Miró continued to be very active against Franco’s regime into and during the 1960s and ‘70s.”
American artists also joined in the efforts to warn the world of the coming dangers. In the 1930s, as fascism was on a fast track in Germany, Italy and Japan, the artists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock were part of the American Artists’ Congress, which tried to counter the rise of fascism through art.
Trump will try to pull the nation down to satisfy his far right supporters and to reflect his puerile tastes. MAGA followers have clearly been on the cultural road to public censorship, with attempts to criminalize the LGBTQ+ community as groups like the proto-fascist Moms For Liberty lead book banning efforts and opposition to LGBTQ+ instruction.
Last year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s MAGA leader and dark knight of the crusade against so-called woke culture, signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, which orders that parents of public school students have “the right to receive effective communication from the school principal as to the manner in which instructional materials are used to implement the school’s curricular objectives.”
The bill resulted in the resignation of the principal of a Florida school after a parent complained that sixth-grade students in an art class were exposed to pornography because they were shown pictures of Michelangelo’s 17-foot tall statue of an entirely naked David, the Biblical figure who kills the giant Goliath. The David was completed by Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504 and was instantly hailed as a masterpiece.
After worldwide concerns were raised, the principal was later given a tour of the Galleria dell´Accademia in Florence, Italy.
“To think that David could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture, and not understanding Renaissance art,” said Gallery director Cecilie Hollberg.
The trump administration will try to shape the art world to reflect its ideology. The Project 2025 blueprint for the trump reign proposes to outlaw what the government deems as pornography and to imprison those who create alleged pornography.
The 920-page mandate, created by the right wing Heritage Foundation, calls for drastic cuts in federal programs and sweeping changes in social services. It reads, in part, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.”
Pornography is generally protected under the first amendment but the trump administration will likely ask the conservative-dominated court to redefine and greatly expand obscenity laws. There is a potential for damages to the entire art world, from paintings by Leonardo DaVinci, to TV shows like “Game of Thrones” to the Bible which makes 38 metaphorical references to male and female genitals and includes several accounts of oral sex.
Today, the most common targets for suppression involve art about reproductive rights and the Israel-Palestine war. In March 2023, Lewis-Clark State College, in Idaho, removed pro-choice artwork by Katrina Majkut, Michelle Hartney, and Lydia Nobles from an exhibition, claiming they violated the No Public Funds for Abortion Act. Starting in 2021, the law prohibited the use of public funds for abortion, including for speech that appears in its favor.
This past March, a portrait by Charles Gaines of the late Palestinian intellectual and activist Edward Said was briefly removed from Gaines’ solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Miami. The decision came at the time of the museum’s annual benefit for private donors. Gaines was not informed that the painting would be removed.
Censorship caught the Oakland-based performance artist Xandra Ibarra off guard when she received a text in February 2020 from a curator of a group exhibition to open at the City of San Antonio’s Centro de Artes gallery. The text informed Ibarra that a video she made for the show had been removed because it exposed sexual and racial tropes.
The censorship caught the attention of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), an organization formed two decades ago to uphold the right of free cultural expression. The group wrote the Mayor San Antonio, asking him to pressure the gallery to restore Ibarra’s work because of its “artistic value.”
“Artistic value” is one of the three main requirements used by the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if speech or expression is obscene and can be suppressed.
The letter argued that “city-owned spaces are ruled by the free speech clause in the First Amendment,” and that “government officials cannot arbitrarily or systematically impose their prejudices on a curated exhibition.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined in the effort to include Ibarra’s art. But the movement to show Ibarra’s work was defeated in March 2020, when the gallery closed and did not reopen because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
A retrospective of Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby was canceled after it was scheduled to open in February at Indiana University’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art. The artist was notified of the cancellation for unspecified “safety concerns.” The NCAC wrote the museum objecting that Halaby’s abstract art was cancelled because of “the artist’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and activism.”
The National Coalition Against Censorship has created a new online tool, the Art Censorship Index, to track and map incidents of censorship. The index is limited to incidents in which institutions “expressly canceled, withdrew, or abandoned a program or work after plans to present it had been communicated, and where the reason for the withdrawal was related to the perceived political content of the work, the personal politics of the artist, or the national or cultural associations tied up in the content of the work.”
Incidents indexed in the U.S. include the cancellation of a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen about his memoir “A Man of Two Faces.” The event was cancelled after Nguyen had signed an open letter in the London Review of Books that was critical of Israel.
Also noted on the map was a cancellation of a discussion by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna at Ohio University. The event was halted after concerns were raised about Manna’s video “Foragers,” which focuses on the Israeli government’s “criminalization of the Palestinian practice of foraging wild plants.”
One of the most telling ways to understand trump’s artistic taste or lack of it is to consider the celebrities who endorsed him. There are no Academy Award winners like Kamala Harris backer Robert DeNiro but there is Scott Baio who played Chachi Arcola on the sitcom Happy Days.
Here are some of trump’s version of cultural beacons such as formerly imprisoned, former Indiana Gov. Rod Blagojevich; Jake Paul, who is getting ready to fight Mike Tyson; imprisoned Tiger King star Joe Exotic; and the ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan. Here are some other backers:
* Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who spoke trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City and joked that Puerto Rico is “a floating island of garbage.”
* Porn actor Richelle Ryan.
* Model, Amber Rose, who endorse trump in July but in August 2016, said trump is “just such an idiot. He’s so weird. I really hope he’s not president.”
* Actor Mel Gibson whose career was derailed after he made anti-Semitic comments.
* Celebrity chef Paula Deen who was sued in June 2013 by Lisa Jackson, former manager of Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House, which is owned by Deen and her brother, Bubba Hiers. Jackson claimed Deen and Hiers were guilty of racial and sexual discrimination.
* Actor John Schneider, star of the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show, posted on a social network that President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, should be hanged. The posting warranted an investigation by the Secret Service.
* Pro Football Hall-of-Famer Brett Favre who was found to have funneled $8 million intended for Mississippi welfare funds into causes he championed.
* Imprisoned “Tiger King” star Joe Exotic who was sentenced to 22 years in prison on 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of attempted murder for hire. Exotic has offered his services as director of the Fish and Wildlife Service in a second Trump Administration.
* Actor Kelsey Grammer, a strong disbeliever in climate change science. scientific consensus on climate change,
* Tucker Carlson who said trump survived an assination attempt in Butler, Pa., through “divine intervention.”
* “The Passion of the Christ” star and QAnon conspiracy believer, Jim Caviezel.
* Shazam! Actor Zachary Levi.
* Former Indycar driver Danica Patrick.
* Actor Taryn Manning who portrayed Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett in the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) and Cherry in Sons of Anarchy.
* Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been attacked for of making a series of antisemitic statements, including denying the Holocaust.
* Rapper Kodak Black, who was shot on February 12, 2022, during a fight outside a Los Angeles Italian restaurant where Justin Bieber was hosting a Super Bowl-week party.
· Comedian Roseanne Barr who was an election denier for trump and once retweeted a false QAnon conspiracy claim that trump had saved hundreds of children from sex traffickers during his first month in office.
· Actor Kevin Sorbo, the actor who played Hercules and denied that trump lost the 2020 election.
· Actor Jon Voight, who said the trump-Biden campaign was “our greatest fight since the Civil War — the battle of righteousness versus Satan, because these leftists are evil, corrupt, and they want to tear down this nation.”