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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.”
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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.