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On February 19, Donald Trump visited Truth Social to celebrate his victory over congestion pricing in his home state. “CONGESTION IS DEAD,” he wrote. “Manhattan and all of New York City are SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The message was picked up by the official White House account X, which tweeted it with an AI-generated image of Trump with golden hair and a crown blocking out the New York City skyline.
The illustration, framed like a Time magazine cover, demonstrates the president’s affinity for crude symbols of power and wealth. He is a master of literalism, and that literalism has informed many of his self-indulgent activities since he reoccupied the White House. (For example, his recent appearance at a mixed martial arts event in Miami with Elon Musk and other dignitaries, who entered the stadium to the sound of Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”) Trump has proposed a military parade featuring Humvees and helicopters for his birthday, and according to CNN, he has been busy updating the Oval Office for his second term, replacing wooden consoles with ornate marble-topped tables, hanging “gilded rococo mirrors” on the doors, placing golden cherubs on the pediments, and wrapping the TV remote in glittery paper. (His “golden boy” had to be flown in from Florida.) He hung a portrait of George Washington with a sword opposite an oil painting of a grinning Ronald Reagan, and both former presidents will soon be able to admire the Rose Garden that Trump plans to pave. Nearby is a paperweight shaped like an ingot, engraved with the word TRUMP; at the rate subtext can turn into text, the president will soon use his TRUMP paperweight to smash the head of a bald eagle.
During his first term, the artist who seemed most in tune with his aesthetic was John McNaughton, whom art historian Jennifer A. Greenhill calls “MAGA’s court artist.” McNaughton’s works of the president—fantasy scenes rendered in a flat, hyperrealistic style—regularly went viral on Twitter before Musk took over. Trump is often depicted with other presidents smiling approvingly at him. He might be wielding a machine gun, playing a football, holding a flag, or creating a masterpiece on his own easel. In 2018’s “Crossing the Swamp,” Trump, posed as George Washington, holds a lantern above his head as Nikki Haley, Ben Carson, and other members of his first cabinet row through the brackish Delaware. There’s a tawdry, romantic, heroic nostalgia to the image, as if Norman Rockwell had undergone a lobotomy.
In The Atlantic in 2019, Greenhill compared McNaughton’s portraits to “painted memes,” noting that they were “designed for digital consumption.” But advances in artificial intelligence have allowed supporters to flood social media with ever more partisan and vivid images of Trump’s second presidency. These include migraine-inducing scenes of Trump riding a lion and playing an electric guitar. Like the old memes, the new ones leave little room for interpretation. Trump is strong, so he’s a bodybuilder. He’s our savior, so he wears a white coat.
It’s no surprise that Trump has turned to machine propaganda. During his campaign, his Truth Social account posted a series of fake photos of Taylor Swift and her fans, implying that Swift had endorsed him for president. “I agree!” he wrote. The artificial intelligence that has surrounded the Trump administration reflects Trump’s ideal world, as when he reposted a clip created by Arcana Labs of Gaza emptied of its real inhabitants and resplendent with gilded effigies of himself. These illustrations seem to have eliminated the need for a court artist: Trump now has dozens, if not hundreds, of people creating flattering images of him on social media. He can even, if he chooses, cut out the middleman and conjure up the images himself. It makes sense that a man who yearns for a reality untouched by others would be drawn to art untouched by anything human. While Musk is breeding a “legion” of children who could one day populate Mars, Trump appears to be returning to asexual reproduction, purging his sphere of activity of any ego but his own.
If you squint, Trump has been pushing a bot-brain vision on America for years. At one of his inaugural balls in 2017, he showed off a cake that resembled a Seussian top hat, with nine tiers stacked in a whimsical tower of pale blue and navy, the fondant set off by red stripes, silver stars, garland, and the presidential seal. The cake echoed the design
Sourse: newyorker.com
