Every morning, do you turn on social media, one eye closed, fearful of what chaotic, unhinged, embarrassing pronouncements have come from White House? Erratic and bombastic communication is the norm in authoritarian regimes. A populace that has no idea what normalcy feels like is numb and, ideally, too weak to rise up.
Around 6 AM each morning, I scroll the news for topics to share on my social media channels. Art history can be visual decadence and frivolous beauty. In the past, I’d look for ways to get people excited about art—oh, this makeup trend is similar to how Renaissance artists did skin tone, or this filter makes people’s faces look like this artwork. It was like a game for me, having spent years teaching art history, to find surprising connections with the everyday. Many of my connections hinged on the visual. Drawing attention to visual similarities and differences is a great tool for helping people appreciate art. Surface appreciation could then be deepened. Hook them with pictures, then lead them to the bigger ideas.
My approach to public art history is a good counterpoint to Trump’s approach to thought. The man can barely understand what he sees, so he reformulates it into visuals that reflect his simplistic worldview. In his attempt to reform our world to fit his narrow mindset, the worst of our national culture has risen to the surface. Our venal, hateful, self-satisfied, ignorant, racist, petty sensibilities play out on the world’s stage, much to the delight of the anti-American contingent worldwide. As a birthright citizen, no thanks to Trump and anchor baby Marco Rubio, I see what the global anti-American folks see. We allowed this to fester. But how did we get to this place?
We are now living in historically corrupt and indefensibly evil times. Children are being captured from schoolyards and locked up in detention centers. Our leaders are fleecing our nation. They spend the rest of their days finding novel avenues for workplace incompetence. In the face of such inhumane governance, art history might seem inconsequential.
In each of Trump’s incursions onto the footprint of Washington, D.C., we see where our nation has gone awry. Trump is a symptom, after all. While Trump is a terrible person, the 77 million people who voted for him are similarly rotten. That many of his voters are now unhappy does not exonerate them. In fact, their buyer’s remorse highlights how little they can fathom about empathy for people who are different. They are rotten people who are unhappy at getting what they hoped to mete out to others. Being selfish and self-centered at the national level is inexcusable.
First and foremost, he believes he has been wronged. Canada, NATO, and the EU are all stealing from the US and his mind. Every one of Trump's actions is an active attempt to rectify an injustice he believes he suffered. In reality, he cannot accept changing reality. As a boomer, he was raised in a time when the United States was unparalleled, partly because other continents were at war. In addition, the US received payments and had major contracts to rebuild parts of the world. It was an unequal system. Trump’s anger stems from his liking for the privilege of being in a position of power. Michael Kimmel, in Angry White Men (2013), caused this sense of entitlement. White men feel angry that their mobility has gone downward. He says, “the sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful.” In other words, anything that moves the power balance away from white men feels like a rage-inducing wound that can only be healed through an evening of the scales.
Yet a true evening of the scales globally for white American men would require many things that Trump is not willing to do. They would need to change to keep up. He’s not willing to learn how tariffs work. He’s not willing to change an approach he heard worked in the 1980s from Roy Cohen, his corrupt, closeted lawyer. He’s not willing to adapt. His grievances outweigh all thought. In fact, one of the great selling points for his followers is his anger. He serves as a mirror of their juvenile intellectual state, which is in perpetual emotional outrage.
Given that he and his followers are emotionally stuck in anger and intellectually incapable of meeting the global stage where their purported luster for existing as white men is not a currency, he can only pretend to address these imagined grievances with symbolic prizes. Trump’s monstrous arch is exactly the kind of symbolic visual to the angry white dude he is trying to appease. It’s big; it’s shiny. And it’s a consolation prize for a man who hasn’t won a war.
It’s empty of meaning because, as I’ve discussed before, historically those arches were for when you want something. But Trump is a winner for a voting populace that couldn’t win in a race against themselves. His successes are a man who bankrupted a casino; they only seem good if you misunderstand how reality TV is the cheapest type of fiction to produce.
While Potemkin villages are most likely fictional, the story is similar to what’s happening in Washington, D.C. Purportedly, Catherine the Great's advisor, Potemkin, wanted to show the great works. He’s doing it; however, those works weren’t done. He had the workmen erect fake villages, basically a stage set. He brought her through town, never leaving the carriage. She was thrilled. He got the accolades. Potemkin was vastly smarter than Donald Trump, but Trump is attempting to use trickery to enveigle his base. He is happy to erect a subpar arch as a decoy for his failures. By framing it as a victory for his people and his ilk, they feel that the grievance of no longer getting a free pass for being a mediocre human being is assuaged. Empty people are happy to have empty prizes.
The arch is also symbolic of the anti-intellectualism of our era. Many Republican voters have never left the United States and might only know Paris from the Internet or Vegas. It is also so similar to an arch that Hitler never got to construct. (Incidentally, Hitler, like a coward, sat out the end of the war in his bunker; Trump is incredibly focused on building the ballroom, which is really just an ugly cover for extensive bunkers under the White House.)
In other words, many Americans have been trained to believe only what is told to them rather than to live with intellectual curiosity. They consume architecture and visual culture in visual snapshots. A white building with columns is important. If someone in power says this is good, it is good.
Historically, this anti-intellectualism was helpful to our founding fathers. While they exposed intellectualism for themselves, the religiosity of their poor white constituents meant a group of people who could submit to authority. People who were controlled by faith are happy to comply with power. Intellectualism therefore was the purview of the wealthy. White working people were meant to put their heads down and work except for on Sundays when they were expected to submit to God.
Anti-intellectualism therefore became associated with religiosity and compliance. A good American followed the system, without question. Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf, 1963) points out that intellect in the American consciousness was often “is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness.” Being critical and thoughtful is un-American. Questioning the system is vilified as a trick. The power of anti-intellectualism in the way becomes self-actualizing. To be thoughtless becomes a badge of Americanness, but since you’re never exposed to new ideas, you fester in your ignorance. This populace is proud of their ignorance, seeing compliance as the pinnacle of Americanness. Many come from communities where ignorance is a generational virtue.
Trump validates their stupidity and compliance. How many MAGAs say he’s just like us? The man grew up as the son of a millionaire in Queens. He’s not like a white guy in a trailer park in Modesto, California, in any way. But he leads with being aggrieved and follows it up with stupidity, so the similarity is enough for them. In this narrow frame of experience, they love Trump’s penchant for gold, which was either learned from the new-money people who, like him, were not allowed into the Manhattan elite or from his time with Russian oligarchs who largely made their money in shadowy ways. Why? Sure, gold is expensive, but it’s also the easiest marker of class. The shine is simple.
As I’ve discussed, class markers in the US have gotten ever more nuanced. As commodities become more widely available, the signs of class and taste become even more experiential. But Trump and his wealthy donors don’t want entry into old money class. They validate each other, and in their system, shiny is classy enough. In fact, the tackier, by historic standards, the better for Trump. His use of gold is his way of thumbing his nose at the establishment. They didn’t let him in, and he was incapable of understanding subtle beauty. Rather than learn anything, he’d rather just go straight to the easiest tell- shiny.
The gilding of statues originally meant to have patina is, therefore, his way of imposing his simplistic aesthetic on the nation. It’s a visual anti-intellectualism. Seeing the beauty of patina requires enjoying the subtle shades and shadows. It also often evokes emotions. To look into the face of the thinker, you can’t help but imagine the power of thought. In the uniform gold, there is only brightness. For a populace trained in submission and compliance, the simplicity of aesthetics offers the easiest way to sidestep the complexity of thought that visual media fosters.
Take Joel Shapiro's sculpture, a blue figure in movement, that sat outside the Kennedy Center. Shapiro’s cast metal sculptures employ the simplest of human representations, the stick figures, universal since cave art, to show the universality of movement. Community and similarity are antithetical to Trump’s grievance culture, as it is. But no doubt Trump saw the blue as a symbol of the evil Democrats, ignoring that he’d planned a blue pool between the Lincoln and Washington monuments.
In the removal, we see another essential weakness: his deep narcissism. Every action is meant to celebrate him. President of the United States is meant to work for every American, not to elevate one special American to despot. Nothing is more narcissistic than the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center.
So as grocery prices go up, why does he still have so many followers? As Wendy Brown writes, many of his followers have created “Wounded Attachments”; he is a substitute for the strongmen in their Sunday pulpits. For many white Americans, “Politicized identity…enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics”; politics is the blood sport of allegiances instead of the forging of community across communities. As long as other Americans are brought up as adversaries, the status quo remains, and the people in power remain that way.
But any sane person can see that cutting down age-old cherry trees for a golf course and ripping up a rose garden are asinine, right? In high-control systems, compliance is achieved by making ever more challenging demands on followers. So if putting a UFC fight is sort of okay, then he’ll up the stakes, continuing to squeeze Americans while giving the king Midas to every surface in DC. Their compliance is being tested, and for a populace that loves allegiance, they cannot deny him now. Yes, some of this is the sunk cost fallacy. Many have lost family and money (Trump phone anyone). But for the true believers, he needs to triple down on uglifying D.C. to make them prove their allegiance to ever more stupid visual stunts.
After all, as Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) points out, these are people “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” They are only able to see what he says, like the dumbest robots on the planet (and remember Elon makes robots)
In total, he builds to settle scores, makes it ugly because beauty requires nuanced thought, and keeps upping the ante to keep his cult in compliance.
But what about the rest of us watching the daily monstrosities? Many of us scream into voids, pillows, and the internet. We organize locally. We plan to vote. We work in community with other local organizers. But then there is the group that is actually culpable but doesn’t realize it. The 80 million who sat at home. The people who see what’s wrong but won’t do or say anything. Silence is Compliance. Sure, Congress is staying silent, and they should all lose their jobs. But the compliant and complacent amongst our populace will need to look hard at their actions. As Stanley Milgram wrote in Obedience to Authority (Harper & Row, 1974) “This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” To sit by is to enable the worst of us.
Here’s the real crime in the last decade. We’ve lost our decency and with it our humanity. The tech companies certainly fostered this evil, but they’d say they only allowed what was already seeded in our society. The horrors Trump pushes onto D.C. are nothing compared to what’s unleashed on the world and the American populace. They’re just showing the world the festering wound we’ve been living with for two centuries.
