Trump’s 'brittle' attempt at art propaganda is crumbling: opinion

U.S. President Donald Trump holds an image of a rendering of the new White House ballroom in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 22, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

President Donald Trump’s attempt to burnish his legacy through propaganda is crumbling all around him, according to a prominent editor.

“... [C]compared with those of his predecessors, Donald Trump’s cultural campaign is perhaps the most overt and visually distinct,” wrote The Atlantic's assistant editor Isabel Ruehl on Thursday after comparing Trump to the Soviet Communist Party and previous presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. “Memes aside—his administration’s social media has its own aesthetic—Trump’s architectural and design taste maximizes size, gilt, and jingoism, asserting the superiority of his administration above all that came before and all that will come after.”

She also used examples like The Independence Arch, whose nickname, ‘Arc de Trump,’ complete with gold-lettered inscriptions and gilded statues.

"During his second term, he tacked his name onto the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chairman, declaring his ‘Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture’; he razed the East Wing in favor of a ballroom, reportedly projected to cost about $600 million; he paved over the White House’s Rose Garden so that it would look like Mar-a-Lago’s beach club, featuring the same yellow-striped umbrellas; and his administration overhauled the selection process for the Venice Biennale, requiring American submissions to ‘showcase American excellence.’ (Trump’s name was recently removed from the Kennedy Center after a federal judge ordered it, and a legal battle continues over whether the president has the authority to build the ballroom without congressional approval.)”

All of these efforts, Ruehl writes, have been unsuccessful in solidifying Trump’s legacy, including Trump’s attempt to put his name on the Kennedy Center, which ultimately failed, and his censorship of museums by trying to remove “improper ideology” from its exhibits. Even though these efforts ultimately failed, they still display a desire to impose his personal philosophy on aesthetics and understanding history over the rest of the American public.

“Trump’s influence over American art and museums has its limits,” Ruehl explained. “Artists have canceled shows at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, and some exhibits are sidestepping the president’s war on DEI. In January, the National Museum of African Art opened a show by LGBTQ artists from Africa and the diaspora, and this month, an augmented-reality display on the National Mall tells the stories of five women who worked alongside the men monumented there.”

She added, “And as my colleague Clint Smith recently reported, the leadership at the Smithsonian is holding steady—for now. Lonnie Bunch, the 73-year-old secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in March that ‘there is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian.’ (But as Clint notes, Bunch also ‘appears to be inching closer’ to leaving.) Meanwhile, the administration’s threats linger, mostly in the form of withholding funding from museums and artists that do not obey its vision.”

Ultimately Ruehl refers back to the ideas of famous essayist George Orwell, who wrote that “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” She argues that “free expression in America has not been snuffed out, even when faced with political opposition in the past. But the Trump era is the latest test of just how much it can endure, and how it might evolve in response.”

Ruehl is not alone in criticizing Trump’s taste and competence as a creative person. The New York Times revealed that Trump’s attempt to renovate the Reflecting Pool has failed because of his cronyistic approach and incompetence.

“President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with ‘knives’ in the ‘dark of night,’” The New York Times’ wrote Maxine Joselow and David A. Fahrenthold on Tuesday. “But government documents obtained by Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the ‘American flag blue’ coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.”

In March, Trump’s destruction of the White House’s historic East Wing to build a ballroom also fell flat.

“The hurried reviews, with construction cranes already swiveling above the White House grounds, are an abrupt departure from how new monuments, museums and even modest renovations have been designed and refined in the capital for decades,” wrote Emily Badger, Junho Lee and Larry Buchanan of The New York Time Times. Many serious structural issues have emerged in the nascent structure because it is being rushed in the face of legal challenges.

“In the sprint to complete it before the end of his term, the addition appears to have compressed the normal design evolution for any project,” the Times wrote. “As recently as October, the president was still increasing the ballroom’s capacity, the kind of decision needed at the concept stage. And the White House has said it plans to begin building in the spring, a timeline that would mean construction documents would have to be prepared even as the design was still under review.”

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