The increase in AI-generated images of Donald Trump presages yet another crude campaign to extract profits from the MAGA masses. The payoff could be far greater than that yielded by TrumpCoin, and certainly more lucrative than the flogging of Trump Bibles at $59.99 a copy ever hoped to be.
Having learned that a major auction devoted exclusively to AI art is scheduled at Christie’s New York, the President and his curators now furiously pad their catalog in the rampant pursuit of cash and adulation: Trump as guitar hero, as monster truck driver, as golden-boy surfer, as green-jacketed golf champion of Arnold Palmer proportions.
On Wednesday, the White House issued a grinning, glowing portrait depicting Trump as King on the cover of Time, as if the magazine were lauding the Malign Despot for having just “freed” Manhattan from the tyranny of congestion charges.
The sale of collectible etchings (digital and “real”) duplicated in their millions; robot-made paintings in gaudy, gilded frames; 3D-printed busts of every size: all of these scams are not just possible, but inevitable. Thanks to the AI “revolution,” Trump now commands a billion-brush stable of court painters—legions of pliant Gilbert Stuarts, Norman Rockwells and Leroy Neimans. If Morris Katz, the “King of Schlock Art” capable of knocking out 100 portraits in twelve hours, were alive today and in Trump’s employ, he would have already received the following message on Truth Social from the reigning President: “You’re fired!”
In contrast to the monarchs of yore who had to spend long hours perched on their thrones when their portraits were taken, fidgety Trump doesn’t have to sit still for a minute now.
It is fitting that the first of the AI “artworks” to gain the notoriety that is the perquisite for personal enrichment styled Trump as an orchestral conductor. Pretext for the image was the Night of Long Knives at the Kennedy Center, home to the National Symphony, among other organizations and offerings. As Trump’s TRUTH dispatch put it, the institution and its program were to be cleansed of those “who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
After the seizure of power, it is not only the populace that must be rid of undesirables, intruders, and resistance. The machinery of government must also be radically retrofitted, the Deep State purged. Police, military, government, education—all require transformation, molding by and into the image of the Leader. The political maneuverings of fascist transformation go fist in glove in the crafting of a renewed conception of the People—das Volk. Crucial in this transformation is culture, which must be returned to its mythic past, must be made Great Again.
The parallels between a Commander-in-Chief and Conductor-in-Chief are revealing in ways that Trump’s image-makers are utterly unaware of.
When an orchestra is on stage, it is the conductor who is the only one who doesn’t make any music. In rehearsals, press conferences and fundraisers, the conductor can instruct, charm, bully, and brag. But the truth (not the TRUTH) is that in the performance itself, the musicians will go on whether or not he (or rarely, she) waves his (or her) arms.
There is no clearer proof of this than Leonard Bernstein winding up the well-oiled machine of the Vienna Philharmonic and then letting it run without conducting at all.
Another Trumpian tactic is on display here: that of taking credit for something which is not his, by mugging for the cameras. Bernstein’s grimaces and gestures are not unlike Trump’s swayings and sneerings to the disco beat of “Y.M.C.A” at campaign rallies and inaugural balls.
The unseen pit orchestra of Project 2025 plays on as efficiently as the Vienna Philharmonic, regardless of the antics of the maestro.
Many conductors have violent tempers. Long-time director of the NBC Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini was terrifyingly abusive. After Sir John Eliot Gardiner punched one of his singers for exiting the stage in the wrong direction, the British conductor and friend of King Charles resigned as head of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras that he had founded. Trump/Hydra-like, Gardiner is now back at the head of another musical establishment newly formed by and for him. Trump’s motions, manners, and moods have long had a conductorly imperiousness to them.
Bernstein opened the Kennedy Center in 1971 with his Mass, a work commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy. Richard Nixon gave the event a miss, angry at the composer’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
Not so, Trump. He doesn’t have the patience to sit through an entire concert, never mind conduct one. But had he been in the White House back then, his repetiteurs would have informed him that Bernstein was gay and man of leftist sympathies, and that his inaugural work for the Kennedy Center was way too woke, as in:
Sing God a simple song: Lauda, Laude …
Make it up as you go along: Lauda, Laude …
Sing like you like to sing
God loves all simple things.
The G. Gordon Liddy and his Proud Boys would have extraordinary-renditioned Bernstein before he got within a mile of the Potomac. Unlike the current President, Nixon was quite musical, but lack of talent or training wouldn’t have stopped Trump from taking the podium himself if just for a few marquee moments of a last-minute replacement of Bernstein’s Mass—the 1812 Overture.
Trump’s predecessors in the exercise of absolute power pursued similar strategies of preemption. Fredrick the Great summarily fired musicians who displeased him and packed his opera house in Berlin with soldiers when ticket sales flagged.
The recently dismissed performers, administrators, and board members at the Kennedy Center may hope that Trump’s grandstanding about the rot of drag shows and kindred depravities enacted by the woke brigades will not spur the MAGA hordes to thunder to the Kennedy Center to hear “America’s tenor” and Trump favorite Christoper Maccio in an Evening of Patriotic, Family-Friendly Songs.
Other are quite sure that the faithful will indeed be lured hence by rumors that the Conductor-in-Chief might be seen to wave his arms at a hundred supplicant strings accompanying a Black-and-Decker crooner hymning the most blessed among women: “Ave, Melania.”
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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