The Aesthetics of White Heteropatriarchy in Donald Trump’s America

Kate Crawford, a research professor of communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, warned a crowd during a 2017 session at SXSW about the harm of artificial intelligence to democracy and the rights of free expression. Crawford is a world-leading researcher into artificial intelligence and machine learning tech and their impacts on culture and society. Working at Microsoft Research at the time of this lecture, Crawford was clear and pointed: “This is a fascist’s dream. […] Power without accountability.” 

That was eight years ago, reports The Guardian. In the years since, artificial intelligence has reached new heights, generating realistic deepfakes and digital synthetic doubles so convincing that whole swaths of laypeople live in a real-life artificial reality. Critics of Republican President Donald Trump have, correctly, pointed out the administration’s reliance on images and videos generated by artificial intelligence to distribute via his various personal social media accounts and the official agency pages that follow his own style guide. Investigative reporting, academic analysis, and simple social media scrolling by folks like you and me can see, if we choose to, and in real time, a presidential administration addicted to new technology. 

Depictions of Trump as a king or AI illusions, and hallucinations of a healthy, vivacious chief executive flying an F-35 that dumps waves of feces on protestors in the street. How is this not viewed by other Republicans in power as conduct that is unbecoming of a 79-year-old leader and his staff, as they simply reduce the business of the American government to a meme? That said, ask yourself if you expected to see a White House press secretary and communications director call a credentialed reporter a “little fucking bitch” or chide that reporter with “your mom” jokes. A sidebar, but it is notable.

But what gets me the most is the imagery of blatant bigotry, racism and male dominance. Many, if not all, of the images appear to be artificially generated and published by a federal government cabinet department through its official social media channels. There are no comparable incidents in recent U.S. history to this one. Anyone scrolling through the hellscape of X (formerly Twitter) or past government job ads on LinkedIn has likely encountered a Norman Rockwell-esque poster of young, blonde, fit, white men. The style of these images is reminiscent of the aesthetics of the early twentieth century, derived from a style of political propaganda tied to Soviet revolutionary art that depicts historic and heroic struggles. Some images posted by the U.S. Department of Labor are similar to this “heroic realism” but take it further, resembling a derivative aesthetic of Nazi Germany that combined depictions of great societal struggle with Roman and Greek classicism—strong, billowing men, white, viewed in near homoerotic poses.

A series of images generated by artificial intelligence and posted by the Labor Department is being used to promote its various workforce development programs, including its apprenticeship training program. The photos in this series, as noted, depict strong white men wearing hard hats, shirts accentuating their hardened, well-trimmed physiques, and completely lacking gender and ethnic representation, and are “Nazi-esque,” or, in Crawford’s words: a “fascist’s dream.”

Slogans that tug at the heartstrings are plastered on the images, meant to evoke the mindset of the Second World War era on work and the economy. They feature tropes of supposed unyielding patriotism, with one saying, “Your Nation Needs You!” Other slogans include, “Make America Skilled Again” and “America’s Future Depends on You!” Nehemiah Franks, editor and founder of The Black Wall Street Times, authored a column in September diving into this very subject. 

Franks noted in his column, alluding to the Nazi-style framework of these images, “The face of America’s future is not only white and male. To pretend otherwise is to erase the very people who keep this country alive, from nurses to builders to teachers to farmworkers that make up a multiracial and multigender society.” That said, these images shared by the Labor Department are outwardly exclusionary, sexist and misogynistic — a horrific and historically accurate echo from the past. 

These artificial depictions are only part of the problem. The central concern might be men in general. (Who better to deliver this message to other cisgender men reading this than a bisexual man himself?) At work with this administration’s imagery, its use of AI to circulate this imagery, and adherents to the Trumpist and Make America Great Again movements is a visibly straightforward, multi-pronged approach to socialize our society’s men toward espousing beliefs sympathetic or reflective of toxic masculinity, heteropatriarchy and white Christian nationalism.

Images are very powerful tools. David Freedberg, author of “The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response,” rhetorically asked, “What credibility can be attached to such apparently incredible tales? In what senses can images have the effectiveness attributed to them there, and in what ways can we talk about that effectiveness?” While Freedberg was referencing religious and historical reactions to sacred art and religious iconography, such as weeping statues or miraculous icons, his questions in the book invite broader reflection on how images influence human behavioral responses based on total belief and emotional attachment. While the images of the working white man circulated by the Department of Labor and other agencies under Trump’s presidency aren’t religious in nature, they provide a glimpse into a follower’s mindset of simple yet powerful iconoclasm that is supported by the blind belief of “making America great again.” 

A clear example of this can also be found in Trump’s efforts to renovate the White House, which involved destroying the East Wing of the presidential residence in exchange for a ballroom cast in styles characteristic of a gilded-style, dictator-chic aesthetic reminiscent of Saddam Hussein and the ostentatious displays of Ba’athist opulence. This is a design choice that complements the propaganda-style AI images and the Trump administration’s official stance on what constitutes “beautiful art.” In late October, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News defending the renovations to the East Wing with an outlandish tirade about a “leftist” agenda that “defaces” American traditions through supposed censorship actions and aesthetics. 

Speaking on air to Will Cain of the conservative news network’s “The Will Cain Show,” Miller argued that the left “scarred the landscape of our country with grotesque, so-called ‘modern art’ that celebrates ugliness, that celebrates defacement. The tragedy is that [of] a political party […] that has ripped down our statues, our monuments, our holidays, our heroes, our heritage.” Miller added, “The Republican Party under President Trump celebrates beauty again and beautification again, and just as President Trump has beautified Washington D.C., now he’s repairing, finally, an area of the White House that has been left in disrepair for decades.” However, evidence and actions of the administration only present a one-sided belief that nothing other than “accepted” art, visuals, and aesthetics should be the dominant creative force in the national political culture.

Trump’s vision of beauty speaks to heteropatriarchal dominance in family and public life. The heteropatriarchal aesthetic under Trump manifests through revitalizing his macho-man visual, cultural, and artistic heteronormativity that reminds the society that men, primarily white, hold power, and they are often privileged and wealthy. Real-world embodiments include men who hold political power, such as Trump and Miller, as well as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the lesser power centers of toxic heteronormativity, like Josh Hawley and Jordan Peterson.

Men with obscene sums of wealth and power can control what can be displayed in museums and institutions for the humanities, the types of literature, music, film, and art that can be published and considered culturally significant, and the predominant architectural and interior designs of a parade of public institutions long besieged and won as ill-gotten gains. They serve as acolytes of a white Christian nationalist, authoritarian-friendly belief system that encourages them to act as the arbiters of what is acceptable or isn’t. Like Miller’s words, the culture they want to eliminate to make America great is riddled with “grotesque, so-called ‘modern art’ that celebrates ugliness.” 

Miller’s words echo through history. Nazis went after “degenerate art” by modernists. Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascist government required government approval for art exhibitions and significantly suppressed “subversive” pieces. The Francoist regime in Spain only favored an approved aesthetic and style that celebrated militarism, nationalism, and religious conservatism. Soviet aesthetics, built up around the cult of personality that Josef Stalin was able to cultivate, present the idyllic worker trudging to lift the image of a state that corrupted Marxist ideologies.

Tying back in the AI-generated images, this is “beauty” to Trump’s camp. In Donald Trump’s America, I must posit that aesthetics for authority are weaponized as politics — and to oppress. The fusion of artificial intelligence and fascist visual traditions represents far more than passing, meme-ified fads. This is what we are stuck with. White male dominance is the central goal of the Trumpist style, and it’s come full circle, or close to it. As Dr. Crawford said at the beginning of this polemic, artificial intelligence in the wrong hands breeds “power without accountability.” What emerges in the ashes of amplifying the oldest oppression systems visually and culturally is a politics of “beauty” and “beautification” used to control, making “tradition” a deeper exercise in erasure—free of dissent, diversity, democracy, and a marketplace of ideas America cherishes.