The Kitschification of America
Two days ago, Trump posted this painting on his official “Truth Social” account:
This single post struck me with a realization: That what President Trump truly exemplifies, at the heart of it all, is the kitschification of America.
For those unfamiliar with the term, kitsch represents a kind of cheap, low effort aesthetic that is often a mishmash of pop-culture sediment scraped lazily together and popularized in the 50s and 60s for the sake of consumerist memorabilia in the form of little gewgaws and cheap souvenir shop trinkets.
Not to get too pedantic or pretentiously sciolistic, but kitsch is in some ways the embodiment of a culture of excess, a culture that has reached its zenith, its peak flowering phase, and has begun to wilt, shedding its invasive spores haphazardly over the once-virgin garden. It is the exaltation of “memeified” cultural tokens to the point of parody, which had come long before the invention of internet ‘memes’. It purposely calls attention to itself, to become a kind of self-mockery in the way “irony” had become a modus vivendi under the thankfully-brief ‘hipster rule’ of the aughts. It resonates even in the chosen names: Golden Dome, Golden Age, Make America Great Again, a strange kind of spiritually inert alchemy in reverse—turning what was once real gold, into fool’s gold and other debased byproducts.
Considering these facts forces you into an understanding of how Trump’s aesthetic vision for America reimagines the nation as a kind of Potemkin village of kitsch memetics long unbound from the core cultural groundings that had actually once given these ideas life.
It has long been a favored aesthetic for philistine oligarchs and uncultured elites—the cheaply showy gold-leaf decors and tasteless recreations of past eras, be it Victorian, Roman, or whatever else the silver-spooned mogul can be bothered to indulge in.
Trump’s obsession with the “golden eras” of the past has led him on a quest of empty vanity projects, with the crowning achievement meant to be a recreation of the Parisian Arc de Triomphe, which was previewed recently at the 250th anniversary state fair in DC. As per usual, Trump’s vision of a monument to American ‘greatness’ resulted in a kitschy travesty which was predictably greeted with widespread mockery.
Trump styles himself as a modern Crassus and Midas in one. Will Schryver put it best when he wrote that Trump has turned into a King Midas-in-Reverse instead:
King Sadim has a certain ring to it, particularly being homophonous with Sodom.
Our modern Midas-in-Reverse hopes his hagiography one day describes the great ‘labor’ of his shepherding the nation through an historic crossroads, a transition between eras. It’s why he styles his iconography around kitschy parallels to the Gilded Age, Belle Epoque, Fin de Siecle, etc.; and he’s not altogether wrong in intuiting the fundamental ethos of our times, a transitional period of wayward decadence preceding something terrible—a time of calamitous revolutions and world wars.
But wherein lies the difference is Trump believes himself to be providentially appointed to steer the country clear of the pitfalls associated with such ‘ending epochs’ and into a golden era of manifest abundance. Unfortunately, he appears blind to the coming realities: things are only getting worse, the very logies and chintzy veneers of the artifice he imagines will herald this ‘greatness’ in the offing instead betray the disintegration happening all around us.
And to top it all off, there is little of substance beneath the gilding and cheap plaster. In an unprecedented display of “will to power”, Trump is attempting to manifest his ‘Golden Age’ merely by shouting it from the rooftops. Instead of carrying out real policies of reconstruction and transformation, fixing jobs, inflation, and all the actual underpinnings of a healthy state, he instead chooses to erect presumptive monuments to hopes and wishes and would-be accomplishments.
But this began as a reflection on the kitschification of America in general, for which Trump is merely a last apostle. A culture becomes kitschified when it has lost its original vital force, the creative spark which once drove it forward, and has turned into a recursive parody of itself. That is America today, sapped of its original vigor and innovation, now trapped in an endlessly recycled loop, like degeneratively rewinding a cassette of oldies thousands of times until only barely-intelligible rasps remain. It’s a nation whose ethos has run dry of ideas and which has resigned to borrowing from the past—Monroe Doctrines, Gilded Ages, down to more recent times: replaying the neocon GWOT broken record over and over until the US military is ground down to chaff over the millstone of history.
Indeed, the country has become much like that painting: a pastiche of better times and misguided hopes, a place where George Washington can sit beside a Tesla robot beneath the St. Louis arch while staring up at a bald eagle magnificently volant o’er the Statue of Liberty.
To end on a praiseworthy note, it must be said that a country cannot reach such a terminal self-parody before first ascending through the stages of greatness and achievement that would serve as grist for such off-puttingly reverential iconography. Thus only in America could kitsch become a defining ethos of the times. Only in America could greatness have crested so high as to subvert itself.
Nations the world over envy the right of becoming so great as to end up a parody of themselves.
So, here’s to American Greatness!
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-kitschification-of-america