One thing Donald Trump has succeeded at in both his presidential terms and he’s barely into the first year of his second, is angering the people of culture and arts. Not subtly. Not incidentally. Not as an accidental outcome of broader policy. No, this has been a deliberate, blustering, unapologetic push that has made artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, actors and even casual appreciators of beauty feel targeted, misunderstood, maligned, and under siege. In Trump’s America, the cultural sector didn’t just become a political punching bag; it became a rhetorical boogeyman, a scapegoat for everything from societal unrest to the erosion of “traditional values.”
It’s important to stress that culture and arts are not some abstract luxury reserved for the elite ivory towers of big cities. They’re the threads that stitch together human experience, identity, memory and emotion. Culture isn’t just paintings in museums and operas in grand halls. It’s the stories we tell our children, the songs that shape our weekends, the films that make us laugh and cry, the plays that reflect back our triumphs and tragedies. To scorn culture is to scorn the very mechanisms by which we understand ourselves and one another.
Yet that is precisely what Trump has done. With each brash tweet, each dismissive comment, each calculated act of provocation, he has positioned culture as the enemy of the “real” America, the rugged, the practical, the unpretentious. The effect has been a kind of cultural trench warfare, where artists are automatically presumed to be liberal elites and any artistic expression that doesn’t align with a narrow vision of patriotism or tradition is derided as elitist or un-American.
This isn’t simply a matter of differing tastes. Every political leader has preferences. But Trump’s approach isn’t about taste, it’s about attack. He has framed culture and the arts as frivolous distractions at best and corrosive forces at worst. He has equated nuanced artistic expression with political opposition. He has used cultural institutions as proxies in a larger cultural grievance narrative, as if museums and theaters are fronts in some ideological battle rather than spaces of reflection and creation.
To be sure, artists and cultural workers have always viewed the world through a critical lens. That’s part of the job: to challenge, to question, to push boundaries and hold a mirror up to society. But the Trump era has made that role perilous. Critique is now greeted by dismissal as “political,” and artistic expression that doesn’t fit a rigidly patriotic mould is labelled as insubordinate or unfaithful. It’s not just an aesthetic judgment, it’s a moral indictment.
This antagonism doesn’t just hurt artists’ feelings; it has real-world consequences. Funding for the arts, especially public funding, becomes easier to slash when the arts are viewed as irrelevant or antagonistic to the national good. When the leader of the country dismisses creative endeavours, it sends a message: society should devalue them too. And for students, emerging artists, and communities that rely on cultural institutions for education and unity, that devaluation is more than disappointing, it’s harmful.
In the Trump worldview, culture is reduced to caricature: abstract, pretentious, out-of-touch. It’s everything that Trump claims to not be. And therein lies the incendiary power of his rhetoric. By defining culture as the enemy of “real” America, Trump creates an us-vs-them narrative that is as simplistic as it is dangerous. Artists are not the elite; they are part of the fabric of the nation, often rooted deeply in local communities, teaching in schools, organizing festivals, engaging neighbours in shared experiences. Their “elitism” is often just intellectual curiosity and emotional empathy.
And yet, because the arts don’t yield simple slogans or easy talking points, they become easy targets for a leader who prefers soundbites over substance. A symphony isn’t as marketable as a rally chant. A complex novel doesn’t generate the same fervour as a polarizing tweet. So culture becomes the bogeyman, the out-group in a political spectacle that thrives on division.
The broader American public, not just artists, should be wary of this dynamic. When we start making enemies out of our cultural institutions, we weaken the spaces where empathy, curiosity, and understanding take root. Culture is where we learn to see from another’s perspective, where we wrestle with uncomfortable truths, where history is not taught as a monolith but examined in all its complexity. Undermining that is not a harmless pastime; it’s a fundamental threat to the richness of civic life.
What’s most striking about Trump’s antagonism toward the arts is that it isn’t rooted in any substantive critique of the value of culture itself. It’s purely transactional, a political tactic designed to mobilize a base by vilifying an easy target. And in doing so, it dismisses the profound role that culture plays in fostering community, resilience, and shared experience.
In the end, the arts are a reflection of the human spirit, messy, contested, passionate, and sometimes infuriating. They are not perfect, and they should be open to critique and evolution. But to reduce them to political pawns or ideological enemies is to impoverish the cultural life of an entire nation.
So while Donald Trump may have succeeded in angering the people of culture and arts, he has also revealed something far more consequential, a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be a society. And if art is anything, it is a society’s attempt to make sense of itself, even when that sense is messy, difficult, and beautifully imperfect.
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