A square chunk of gaudy gold sits at the center of a low table, overpowering much of the other décor visible in the room—an inescapable brick of tacky opulence. One side reads in all-caps like your furious Boomer relative’s Facebook rant: TRUMP. On top is an ornate seal just out of view, obscured by the sheen created by camera lights. Is this the presidential seal? But the center doesn’t look like the broad wingspan of a bald eagle to me; it appears rounder. Is it the grumping profile of Donald Trump himself (please, please, please)? Is it some heretofore unknown Trump family crest with a cheaply built Brooklyn apartment building at the center in honor of Fred’s real estate empire? Inquiring minds—or ok, mind—must know! And what even is this thing anyway? Is it a box for coasters so nobody smears the well-varnished coffee table in the Oval Office? Is it a chic napkin dispenser for those McDonald’s meals? Is it an alternate Diet Coke button (though the real Diet Coke button on Trump’s desk is much more elegant, wood-carved, and distinguished than this flashy gewgaw)? Is it something for the president, his staff, and/or visiting world leaders to stare at and daydream about smashing it into the head of another important person in the room during contentious meetings like the one the world saw last Friday?

While you all were fixating on the now-notorious drama between President Trump, V.P. J.D., and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, I desperately tried to zoom into this gilt square on the table between all three. Sure, the avoidable argument was a spectacle that landed somewhere between an arms-folded, eye-rolling petulant child being scolded by his parents, the Real Housewives of the Oval Office, a boardroom battle on The Apprentice, and a haunting of the West Wing by the ghost of Roy Cohn. But, it’s the tchotchke I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s so ostentatious, so overblown, so TRUMP aesthetic that not even a diplomatic unraveling could overpower it.

Yeah yeah but what is that BOX on the table?

Though it might be the biggest shit show, the Zelenskyy meeting isn’t the only recent notable aesthetic moment. Last week, Trump also posted to Truth Social, as well as on his little-used Instagram, perhaps the most cuckoo content he’s ever shared and that’s saying something considering his impulse to repost MAGA memes of himself as Rambo or splicing his own face with Elvis to fish for compliments about how much he resembles the King. Yet, these are downright normal when compared to the AI-generated tourist ad for “Trump Gaza,” a sparkling vision of the “Riviera of the Middle East” post-ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for Atlantic City before the Trump bankruptcies destroyed it, coupled with a few relevant scenes from the Book of Exodus. The ad begins with Palestinian families digging through the rubble of what is left in Gaza before it explodes into a bright, loud beachside hallucination: children run on the shore, gender-nonconforming belly dancers shake their hips in tandem (Hey! DEI isn’t defunded here!), Elon Musk digs into a plate of hummus when he’s not tossing bills at starving Palestinian children, and Trump ogles a belly dancer and sips a cocktail with Bibi in beach chairs while the Trump Gaza, reminiscent of the Trump Plaza, looms in the background. In addition to this casino fantasy, Trump Gaza also features a looming golden statue of Trump, along with gold Trump head balloons and a market stall filled with Kim Jong Un-esque authoritarian worship gold Trump statuettes—for the home, obviously. That kind of golden calf idolatry will certainly inspire the Old Testament God to smite everyone involved. Impossibly, that’s not even the weirdest part. That designation goes to the nefariously cheery dystopian propaganda jingle that promises “No more tunnels! No more fear! Trump Gaza’s finally here!” and “Trump Gaza shining bright! Golden future a bright new light! Trump Gaza number one!” What the fuck is this?!

What the fuck is THAT?! (From the Trump Gaza AI ad)

The video’s creators, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen of EyeMix Visuals, explained their video was meant to be a joke rather than a “propaganda machine.” I’m not convinced Trump isn’t aware of this, mostly he seems to enjoy tossing provocative, Democrat-triggering chum into the social media waters and watching the press feed on it for several news cycles. I’ll admit, I laughed too. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t disturbing or that there’s nothing worth debating about in this video, which raises issues from the unceasing horror of AI-generated imagery, which gives me the creeps on a cellular level, to how this kitsch insidiously works to erase the human suffering in favor of Vegas Cheesecake Factory schmaltz. The video also fits into a larger discussion of Trump’s incredible, life-long command of aesthetics that he uses both as a weapon and a means to forge a powerful communion with his supporters, often, fascinatingly, dividing and connecting through the same aesthetics. More than any other American leader, at least in my lifetime and memory, Trump’s aesthetics are some of the strongest and most influential: the red hat; all that Trump Tower gold and pink marble; decades of Trump-branded and Trump-advertised crap–steaks, vodka, water bottles, Snapple, laundry detergent, NFTs; unofficial “Fight, Fight, Fight” flags sold from Trump store trailers, tents, and shipping containers on the side of the road in Pennsylvania; his relatable, unwavering fast food consumption and short stint at the McDonald’s drive-thru; the Wrestlemania/Trumpamania trash culture…there’s so, so much.

So, why are there so few writers with expertise in art, aesthetics, and visual culture writing about it? Is it too low class? Too bad bad taste rather than good bad taste as John Waters designates? Is it just safer to focus on something—anything— else rather than dig to the absolute bottom of the American culture dumpster? Of course, as faithful Filthy Dreams readers know and probably resent, I have been banging on about Trump’s aesthetics for quite a while (and am two chapters into tinkering around with a book manuscript on the subject. I’d share my working title that gives me joy but one of you fucks would definitely steal it). I am admittedly singlemindedly obsessed, but I can’t be the only one….Can I? I mean, SOMEONE has to be as entertained as I am with the explosion of JD Vance shitposting memes:

This is art

This is why I sought out the Routledge anthology Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, published pre-2024 victory, after spotting the alluring title of Dorothy Barenscott’s essay “Trumpism, NFTs, and the Cultural Politics of 21^st Century Kitsch” reprinted in ArtForum. Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism is the first book I’ve come across that primarily focuses on Trump and his supporters’ aesthetics rather than painful resistance art responses to Trump’s now decade-long political takeover like The Trump Effect in Visual Art and Culture, which I avoid based on the rotund Mr. Potato Head-like orange Trump baby balloon on the cover alone. Ick. Interrogating…’s editors, Grant Hamming and Natalie E. Phillips, too understand the dearth of more serious writing on Trump style, observing in their introduction that it has “largely eluded more rigorous analysis from an artistic or visual culture perspective.”

I’m not going to lie and say Interrogating… is my idea of a perfect book about Trumpy Bear’s aesthetics. The book is a collection of essays generated from an academic conference, the Southeastern College Art Conference, that was originally planned for 2021 but delayed a year due to COVID. Given its smart fuck origins and publisher, the book is pretty much reserved for ivory tower classroom eyes only, proven by its whopping $160 price gouge, discounted from $200, or an Art of the Deal steal at $31.99 for a digital copy. I mean, what the actual fuck? Who is this FOR? Probably not me! But my greasy pleb fingers were able to stain the pages anyway by requesting a review copy because fuck that. Certainly there is another essay to write here about the elitism of the book’s publishing colliding with Trump’s accessible populist stagecraft. Maybe they should tack it on at the end of a second edition. I volunteer!

Economic griping aside, I needed to know what others were writing about Trumpy aesthetics. The results? Predictably mixed. Given that this is a collection derived from a conference, Interrogating… is unsurprisingly a hodgepodge spanning a little bit of everything. This includes Elon Musk’s pre-DOGE crowded hoarder bedside table that includes a plethora of Caffeine-Free Coke cans and a replica of George Washington’s flintlock pistol alongside a reproduction of Washington Crossing the Delaware; Republican nutto former Congressman and Bigfoot skeptic Denver Riggleman’s Bigfoot schlong meme; dorky depictions of Trump as the God Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40,000; the cobbled-together, cognitive dissonance of the flags flown high at the “low-class” January 6 Capitol riot; and the MAGA movement’s “court artist,” Jon McNaughton. Interspersed within this MAGA mélange are contributions either by or about artists making work about Trump and his policies, which themselves range in quality from Postcommodity’s tangling with the border crisis and its enforcement to Edel Rodriguez’s simple yet startling Time Magazine illustrations to Kate Kretez’s absolutely abysmal art made from MAGA hats like Hate Hat, which constructs a KKK hood out of the famed red cap. In her essay, Kretez describes its conception, “I knew this object must exist in the world and decided that I might as well be the one to make it.” Must it? I’ve defended Philip Guston’s use of KKK imagery in the past, but Guston’s marshmallow KKK figures poke fun at their racist ridiculousness to strip the power from them. In contrast, Kretez maintains its power to make perhaps one of the most unsubtle artistic statements I’ve laid eyes on in the last decade. That is, until I turned the page and saw her MAGA Nazi arm band. Fucking kill me. At least, though, these awful art pieces relate to Trump. The same cannot be said for the book’s shoe-horning in of a conversation with Andrew Krasnow who makes art out of body bits as if Ed Gein had gallery representation. That’ll be a big pass from me.

I’ve made clear my avowed hate of anti-Trump Trump art, which typically does not accomplish much of anything but preach to the libbed-out, art-going choir and mar exhibitions with his mug. There are exceptions, of course, when an artist is determined to seriously wrestle with Trump’s decades of influence on American culture without resorting to snideness or scoffing offense like Andres Serrano’s Donald merch mania pop-up The Game and Ali Abbasi’s Oscar-robbed film The Apprentice. But setting aside my otherwise deep loathing, given the Interrogating…editors themselves point out the lack of critical examinations of Trump visual culture, why waste precious page space on this? The majority of these art essays don’t add much of value.

The Trump fountain from his Trump Tower penthouse as seen in the first episode of The Apprentice (Yes, I’m watching it)

There is one exception, Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick’s “Drain,” which leaps off of Johnson’s drawings to reflect on Trump’s Versailles of artificiality, the extravagant Trump Tower penthouse or as he calls it in The Apprentice, “the nicest apartment in New York City.” Redesigned by Henry Conversano, “a former nightclub singer and designer who had remodeled his Golden Nugget casino in Atlantic City,” the penthouse is, uh, not subtle: “gold and more gold, all aglow and glittering amidst Greek columns, ceiling frescoes, and a mélange of baroque, rococo, and neoclassical furnishings.” The essay concludes by peering into the hallucinatory, procedure-shattering vision of top-secret files hoarded into a chandelier-illuminated bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, which, they write, “evokes both the familiarity of make-do storage and fantasies of luxury.” It’s here that the duo hit the mark on one of the Trump aesthetic’s biggest lures, which is observable from Trump Tower’s pink marble nightmare to his White House fast food buffets (which he has yet to offer a visiting sports team in his second term. Cross your fingers, Eagles players!): “The horror of Trumpian visual aesthetics is their comprehensibility to a base that both relates and aspires to them.” Don’t we all want an extravagant loo within which we cram stolen documents?! I know I do! Hey, where are those Epstein files anyway, Pam Bondi?!

This engagement with the dual low-brow relatability and tasteless luxury aspiration marks the strongest essays in this collection such as the one that drove me to seek out Interrogating… in the first place: Dorothy Barenscott’s “Trumpism, NFTs, and the Cultural Politics of 21^st Kitsch.” Barenscott largely centers her essay on Trumpy’s digital trading card collections, which feature a range of Don donning various masculinity disguises. There’s Trump as a Western sheriff or cowboy; Trump as a superhero (recalling his nixed post-COVID Superman reappearance, about which I’m still furious at whatever staff member put the kibosh on that); Trump as Elvis; Trump as a fighter pilot; Trump as a NASCAR driver…I could go on. Even more astonishing than this probably Village People-inspired masculinity dress-up is that these collections sell out immediately. Given the date of the book’s publishing, it’s too bad Barenscott missed the opportunity to discuss the added gift of a Trumpy relic in a subsequent NFT collection: a cut piece of Trump’s suit worn at the 2024 Biden dementia debate disaster. Talk about kitsch! Does it come with its own reliquary? Though I’d slot Trump’s aesthetics as more trash than kitsch generally (come on: Wrestlemania, Elvis, Kid Rock, etc.), there’s no debate that the Trump trading cards—and NFTs in general—are kitsch, updated, digital forms of Precious Moments figurines. By labeling them as such, Barenscott is able to reach back to that ol’ art history 101 assigned reading stalwart Clement Greenberg and his kitsch kvetching, which, though he’s a stiff that needs to lighten up about kitsch, does seem prescient:

“The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses—even if they wanted to—by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level.”

There is also a sprinkle of Trump magic at work here—that if you buy these kitschy NFTs, you will own a piece of Trump (this is my body…as a cowboy) and will transform into a smart, savvy investor just like him. Or, well, the highly curated reality TV mythologized version of him. This is a bit of, as Annie Ronan quotes James Poniewozik in her essay “Where’s the Beef?” on Trump Steaks, “the capitalist version of transubstantiation” (“the business-man celebrity bestows his blessing on a humble slab of meat and lo, it becomes a Trump Steak”), an image so sublimely sacrilegious I’m ascending just thinking about it. Ronan’s “Where’s the Beef?” is by far my favorite in the collection based on its sheer audacity alone and the utter cheesiness of her “primary site of analysis”–this Sharper Image advertisement for Trump Steaks:

He has never been in the same room as these steaks (ecstatic book scrawl by me)

Ronan hilariously compares this pointy fingered gimmick to John Singleton Copley’s famed 1768 portrait of Paul Revere. For Ronan, these images “bear a shocking formal resemblance” and similar desperate contexts: “Much as Donald Trump had turned to peddling frozen steaks and hot dogs in the immediate wake of a 2004 bankruptcy, in 1768, Revere was relegated to selling serving utensils, satirical prints, false teeth, and other less valuable items.” Maybe Trump could take some inspiration: Trump Dentures! Trump Forks! Ahem…now, I’m not all that convinced Copley’s painting and this Trump scam look all that formally similar other than the duo emerging from the abyss to hock products—Trump’s silver steak platter, in particular, appears like it’s floating in some spiritualist parlor game—yet the claim is so boldly batshit, who gives a shit? I’m going wherever you take me, Annie! She further pushes the berserk criticism by imagining the rising rotten stench of rapidly oxidizing fat under hot camera lights at a Trump campaign event featuring those steaks among other Trump-branded garbage: “For a brief if invisible moment, cow flesh and air conspired to assert their singular presence and in a uniquely visceral way, offered a defiant reminder of the material realities subtending the dangerous, reality-defying absurdities of the visual content industry and its most dangerous manifestation, Trumpist visual culture.”

She’s right. Something stinks in here—repulsive yet weirdly, morbidly enticing. And I hope Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism is just the beginning of writers sticking their nose in, taking a deep whiff, and commenting on it.