At the end of its previous term, the Trump administration turned its attention toward the arts. A 2020 executive order entitled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” mandated that all future projects conform to Neoclassical architectural styles; another series of executive orders concerned the so-called “National Garden of American Heroes,” an assemblage of triumphalist and traditionalist statues of patriotically correct figures, including, among others, Barry Goldwater, Douglas MacArthur, and Vince Lombardi. Both of those previous orders were scrapped by President Joe Biden, only to be resuscitated during Trump’s second term. Now, the new administration is disturbingly consolidating its authority over government agencies concerned with art.
For example, the National Endowment for the Arts updated grant policies to eliminate funding for anything interpreted as related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), while prioritizing propagandistic “projects that celebrate the … semiquincentennial of the United States of America.” Most galling, in an unhinged Truth Social rant, Trump purged the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installing himself as the chair, while extolling his “Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture” on the same social media site. He barked: “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST. RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!”
In a later post, Trump wrote, “from now on, we will wage a Relentless War of purification against the last elements of our Cultural decay! Make American Art Beautiful Again!” Except he didn’t post that. That statement, save the Trumpian affectation of scattershot capitalization and invented second sentence, was delivered by Adolf Hitler in a July 18, 1937, speech at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich.
That Trump and Hitler’s artistic sentiments (among others) can be so seamlessly edited together is beyond cause for concern. While there are still some who pretend that our president’s fascism is an open question — Elon Musk’s Sieg Hiel conveniently explained away — the MAGA movement’s newfound interest in the arts prefigures an even more ominous turn. If cultural institutions were allowed to continue their necessary work of arts funding, exhibitions, and scholarship relatively unscathed during the first Trump administration, that is no longer the case in his second. Trump’s desire to chair the Kennedy Center understandably seems a bizarre waste of time, an exercise in middling dilettantism. But fascism, by its very nature, is obsessed with cultural control. Far from being just another joke exercise in Trumpian narcissism and excess, his new perseveration is evidence of his continued fascist creep.
Hitler was famously a failed painter, a mediocre landscape artist tellingly incapable of ever representing a human figure. As Reich chancellor, he understood his role as a generative force, spending hours with his official architect Albert Speer poring over imagined schematics of a triumphalist New Berlin, or planning museums such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst. From 1937 until 1944, toward the end of the war, Great German Art Exhibitions were staged in Munich, promoting artists whom the Nazis felt exemplified Aryan ideals. “Hitler’s obsession with aesthetics was not merely a personal quirk,” writes Frederic Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002), “but a central driving force behind his political vision, where he sought to ‘re-create’ Germany” — i.e., to make it great again. The dictator understood the charged energy of creative expression, of stunning imagery, grandiose architecture, theatrical spectacle. This was a field of battle as surely as a literal one, the site of “Cultural Struggle” or Kulturkampf. It’s what American alt-right journalist Andrew Breitbart once described when he said that “politics is downstream from culture.” What’s terrifying is that a culture war never remains cold, and it never remains just about culture.
In her landmark 1975 essay in The New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag explains how fascism isn’t just an ideology, but an aestheticized politics that emphasizes the “contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental.” These values were all on display at the Great German Art Exhibition, where 600,000 people viewed the war paintings of Franz Eichhorst, military scenes by Fritz Erler, and neoclassical kitsch by Wilhelm Hempfing. The deserved contemporary obscurity of those artists can be contrasted to those who displayed at the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition held in 1937 — held by the Nazi party to showcase “bad art” — including Expressionist, Cubist, Surrealist, and Dadaist notables such as Piet Mondrian, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso. Ironically, the Degenerate Art Exhibition proved far more popular than the shows of approved art, with more than a million Germans flocking to it in the first six weeks. As for Hitler, his artistic preferences were vehemently conservative and anti-modernist, describing German avant-garde galleries as having mounted “shows [that] were terrible. They were a disgrace.” Actually, that was Trump talking to reporters last Sunday about the Kennedy Center.
Trump shares with Hitler more than just an affection for the prosaic, maudlin, and nationalistic. He also understands the strategic importance of controlling the arts, of not letting apolitical bureaucrats dispense grants or specialists organize exhibitions and schedules, but rather consolidating his own control (as he’s doing over every other aspect of government). His recent actions may seem like micromanaging, but they reveal a darker intent. In his first term, Trump received vociferous condemnation from most in the culture industry, particularly in Hollywood. He doesn’t intend to let speech flow unfettered this second time around. Fascism’s perseveration about cultural control can’t help but recall the repressed and the libidinal, such as Hitler’s obsession over his failure as a painter contributing to his desire to be seen as a great artist, working not with paints and canvas but with people and the nation. Even here, Trump’s own humiliation at being an outer borough has-been never fully accepted in Manhattan is the emotional impetus to his middle finger to the arts establishment.
Though Trump never wanted to be a painter, he has clearly always wanted to be an actor. In a sense, he is — one with a massive international stage. Just as Hitler drew upon all of the creative energies of German culture to evil result, so too could only the United States produce a Trump — a carnival barker and medicine man, shock jock and pornographer, reality show star and pro-wrestler. The Nazis traded in German kitsch, and so MAGA will trade in Americana. Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a conductor before the National Orchestra with the caption “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” As the maestro takes up his baton and the rough beast slouches toward Washington, we must, as artists and critics, ask ourselves: How can we preserve our souls?
