Trump is rewriting American history: how culture became a weapon in politics.

According to Vox: The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart's maxim that 'politics flows downstream from culture.' Perhaps this explains why President Donald Trump is so actively seeking to control American art during his second term: after all, culture shapes politics. If American politics becomes Trumpian, then culture must follow suit.

Trump took the opportunity to conduct a review at the Smithsonian, according to his own understanding of art and history. He stated that he wants to diminish the emphasis on 'the bad moments associated with slavery.' Personally heading the Kennedy Center, the president called for an end to drag shows and what he terms 'woke history.' He cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, resulting in serious consequences for the country's art infrastructure. The remaining funds in the NEA were allocated for his projects: a sculpture garden featuring national heroes, patriotic plays, and concerts in honor of America's 250th anniversary.

Trump has made his views on American art clear. He likes big, grand, spectacular works that are completely representative, devoid of metaphor or symbolism. He dismisses anything that may hint that America was ever less than great—except when it relates to periods of democratic leadership. Trump prefers nostalgic American culture in the style of Norman Rockwell, rather than Kehinde Wiley. He doesn't want Hamilton; he wants 1776, not even a remake of 1776 with women that came out a few years ago.

Trump is not a newcomer to this. The U.S. government has previously intervened in American art. The most famous example: the CIA funded some artists and literary magazines during the Cold War while watching and persecuting others to better shape America's image on the world stage. The CIA also believed that politics flows from culture—especially when your country and opponent possess nuclear weapons, and you seek to avoid their use.

“In our quest to avoid the tragedy of open war, 'peaceful' methods will become more important in times of pre-war turbulence, during actual war, and in times of post-war manipulation,” states a 1945 CIA memorandum that anticipates changes in tactics prompted by the new atomic bomb. Historian Frances Stonor Saunders writes in her pivotal book The Cultural Cold War that the 'operational weapon' the U.S. would use in its war against the Soviets was 'culture.'

The comparison of the CIA's cultural cold war with Trump's attempts to gain influence in the arts reveals significant parallels. Previously, when the U.S. government intervened in the world of arts, it was done with the belief in the existential importance of how America is represented in international art. Moving from the CIA to Trump and back, we can see how America waged a propaganda war in the 1960s and how it attempts to do so again today, in 2025.

“Unite the free traditions of Europe and America”

The CIA's cultural cold war was rather restrained. Many artists funded and supported were unaware that the CIA was promoting their work; some suspected it but did not want to look too closely.

The main tool through which the CIA executed its work was the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a transnational anti-communist organization devoted to winning the war of ideas against the Soviets. Officially, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was an independent organization, however even contemporaries noted that it had significant financial resources for an arts fund based in poor post-war Europe. Artists and intellectuals it funded could expect comfortable air travel and luxury accommodations, as well as access to significant platforms.

However, this money came from the CIA and was accompanied by demands.

Journalist and military historian Melvin Lasky outlined the strategy in a 1947 internal memorandum known as the 'Melvin Lasky Proposal.' Lasky pointed to the failure of the U.S. to strengthen the 'educated and cultural classes' in Europe concerning the American cause, as it is they who, 'in the long run, provide moral and political leadership in society.' Soviet propaganda, Lasky wrote, was undermining America's image abroad: 'Namely, a supposed economic selfishness of the U.S. (Uncle Sam as Shylock); a supposed deep political reaction ('mercantile capitalist press' etc.); a supposed cultural excess ('jazz and swing mania', radio advertising, Hollywood 'incomprehensibles', 'cheesy industry and humaneness'); a supposed moral hypocrisy (issues of colored citizens, conscientious farmers, Oklahomans etc.) and others.

It is no coincidence that the CIA's policy of suppressing any art addressing America's racial issues struck particularly hard at Black writers.

Against such a campaign, Lasky noted that a higher way was a fruitless strategy; it was necessary to have advocates who could counterattack the Soviet narrative.

Lasky saw a possible solution to this problem in creating a literary magazine. It was to demonstrate that behind the official representatives of American democracy stood a great and progressive culture with achievements in art, literature, philosophy, and all aspects of culture that unite the free traditions of Europe and America.

The United States had to prove to Europe that it was not merely a collection of morally degraded people with a segregation problem. Only then could Europe be saved from the Soviet threat.

After the CIA accepted Lasky's proposal, his initial idea of one magazine transformed into 20, all secretly funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the peak of its activity, the Congress also funded prestigious international conferences, cultural exhibitions, and public demonstrations. All of these underwent CIA evaluation to confirm that they met the requirements outlined by Lasky: they had to showcase that the U.S. has a tradition of high culture that could attract the aesthetics of Paris and Berlin, without condemning America for its 'moral hypocrisy'—for social divides or ingrained systemic racism. For the CIA, the stated goal of these magazines was to present a vision of American capitalism to European intellectuals that would discourage their abiding interest in communism.

Much of this art and culture was indeed of high quality and significance. Thanks to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA became a proponent of abstract expressionism in contrast to Soviet socialist realism. It supported the Museum of Modern Art (which destroyed the wall initiated by Diego Rivera when he depicted Lenin and refused to paint it over) as well as the Paris Review, initially created by a CIA agent as part of its cover.

However, art addressing America's racial issues or its activities in other countries was considered suspect and a potential tool of the Soviets. It did not receive prestigious funding from the CIA and at times was even suppressed.

“I will make sure it is killed.”

It is no surprise that the CIA's policy of suppressing any art about America's racial issues particularly hit Black writers hard. James Baldwin and Richard Wright both wrote about the sins of the Soviet Union early in their careers, at which time the CIA supported them. Their essays were republished in the Paris Review and in the CIA-funded magazine Encounters, their novels were distributed abroad at government expense. But when they shifted focus from the Soviet problem to the fight against American racism and the system of control, the CIA support ended. The system of magazines secretly managed by the CIA began to decline in publishing their works. The FBI and likely the CIA also began to infiltrate their lives and gather intelligence on them. (Wright described this as 'the CIA's oscillation between secret support and spying.') W.E.B. Du Bois, in turn, faced the worst part: the State Department simply denied him a passport.

The CIA also operated in Hollywood, where it meticulously vetted films for any hint of anti-American propaganda. An internal CIA report from 1953 describes how an agent persuaded Paramount to include 'well-dressed Negroes' as extras in films to avoid inciting discussions about racism in America. The agent admits that he could not find a way for a movie set in antebellum South. “However,” he adds, “this is compensated by a prominent Negro butler in one of the main character's houses, who is provided with dialogue indicating his status as a freed man and ability to work wherever he wants.”

Not every film could be so easily altered. One script was deemed unsuitable due to its 'implication [that] the wealth of Anglo-Texans [was] built on the exploitation of Mexican labor.' “I will make sure it is killed, when someone tries to restore it at Paramount,” the agent promised. (The film went to Warner Brothers, where it became Giant, the last film of James Dean.) The now cult classic western High Noon was also condemned for its 'unflattering depictions of American townsfolk and the presence of a Mexican prostitute in the plot.' The film had already been released by the time the CIA agent provided his report, but he promised to sabotage its chances at the Oscars. (However, later the film won four awards, not counting Best Picture.)

The arts system created by the CIA was a world of American innocence. In this world, Black Americans had free access to wealth and prestige, where people of color were never exploited, and races coexisted in harmony. Political art was regarded as inferior, a form of exalted propaganda. The legacy of Western art was the greatest cultural achievement, and America now became the guardian of this legacy.

In many ways, this is the artistic world that Donald Trump seems to be trying to recreate again. Only now there is no need to present art to the taste judges of Europe.

“Mediocrity, provincial mentality, terrible middlebrow cult.”

Trump's taste in art leans toward populism and kitsch. Aesthetically, the works he supports as president have less in common with the high artistic creations that the CIA secretly promoted, and more resemble the art favored by Joseph McCarthy, another great censor of American culture during the Cold War.

McCarthy, writes Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, “was an autocrat—he wanted 'to make in America.' ... McCarthyism was a movement—or a moment—ignited by populist disdain for the elite. In turn, McCarthy's crude demagogic rhetoric provoked outrage among the ruling elite. He embodied what A.L. Rose in England despised as 'The Idiot People'; he offended the tastes of elites who detested mediocrity, provincial mentality, terrible middlebrow cult.”

Those artists and thinkers whose works were presented to the public as the most relevant and necessary, as important as they might be, were not necessarily the most relevant and necessary artists and thinkers of their time.

Moreover, a certain aversion to high art made some CIA agents claim that they had to secretly promote figures like Pollock to avoid triggering offensive reactions from McCarthy. “Imagine the hilarious commotion that would arise,” one agent recounts.

Trump, too, has no interest in the intellectualism that the CIA promoted during the Cold War. The art he supports must be representational, and this is indeed his requirement. The grant application for his proposed National Garden of American Heroes specifically prohibits 'abstract or modernist' statues—this is a challenge, as according to Politico in May, there is currently no strong tradition of representational sculpture in the United States.

Representational art was deemed Soviet during the Cold War, hence the CIA did not support it. Deprived of lucrative awards, prestigious publications in literary journals, or participation in international exhibitions, representational art has become less prevalent and less promising, resembling Victorian architecture or portraits in shopping centers. We still live in a world shaped by these choices: the largest number of talents in the field of representational sculpture now comes from China.

This is the kind of disproportionate artistic environment that can emerge when the government intervenes in the arts, even decades after the events. “The government seems to oversee an underground enrichment, in which the first classes did not always align with the desires of the wealthy passengers,” wrote publisher and critic Jason Epstein in 1967 when news of the CIA's intervention in the cultural world began to reach the public. “The CIA and the Ford Foundation, among other agencies, created and funded an apparatus of intellectuals, selected for their correct Cold War positions, as an alternative to a free intellectual market where ideologies generally mattered less compared to individual talents and achievements, and where doubts about established orthodoxies were viewed as the beginning of any inquiry.”

Those artists and thinkers whose works were presented to the public as the most relevant and necessary, as important as they could be, were not necessarily the most relevant and necessary artists and thinkers of their time. These were the ones who best matched the priorities set by the CIA.

Now we live in a world that they created—a world where, regardless of your views on the value of representational art, the fact that there is so little is partially due to artificially manufactured devaluation.

This is one of the most innocuous side effects of government intervention in the world of art, which the CIA executed with unintentional skill, and Trump now conducts with overt frankness. More troubling is the consensus shared by all of them—CIA, Trump, and McCarthy—that any work of art touching upon America's sins must be suppressed, while any work that overshadows them must be supported and celebrated. When the government begins to intervene in art, it seems to always consider itself beyond artistic criticism.