Trump's Accidental Guide to Abstract Thought
Understanding Life and Art Requires Abstract Thought
Trump is not burned out. Destruction energizes him because he doesn’t understand the joy of creation. What’s interesting is that much of what Trump hates (intellectualism, creativity, and diversity) requires higher levels of reasoning, the same reasoning he’d recognize if he ever engaged with the abstract art he also hates.
Writing at the onset of World War II, Erich Fromm explored how freedom drives people to choose fascism. In Escape from Freedom (1941), he describes how isolation leads people to adopt defensive positions, such as aligning with right-wing political groups. By aligning themselves with a community, that is defined against something else, they get both an identity and a raison d’etre. MAGA is similarly fear-motivated. As Fromm says, “Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”
Fear drives them to take in the barest of information. The complexity of the world becomes infuriating and frightening when it’s simplified to a Fox News clip. Think of the difference between “he tried to find the whale” and the complex psychological tale that is Moby Dick. Simplifying can, therefore, be an act of obfuscating and insulating. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.” Short forms lead to simple understandings. The path to depth of understanding is tortuous and idiosyncratic but worth the journey.
Trump’s destructive impact on the landscape of DC highlights his inability to think abstractly and to understand the humanities. The way he arrives at the simplest of plans, and how they generally don’t even go right, offers a good entry into the complex, abstract thought behind much of modern and contemporary art.
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Not the Center of the World
Trump has a face that not even his mother might love, despite her having a very similar face, and yet he dreams of subjecting us all to his visage in as many venues as possible. His face was added to banners on government buildings at the turn of the year, and now he’s announced a special offer: Trump portrait passports. He’s also agitating to have his portrait on currency despite an edict against living presidents on US money. In all of these attempts to maintain the primacy of his imagery, Trump’s dictatorial narcissism is obvious. While we’ll discuss his ill-fated reflecting pool later, one cannot help but remember that Narcissus himself was foiled by a body of water. Strongmen are known for self-promotion. The monument serves as a stand-in for them, a visual reminder of where authority lies, underscoring the futility of resisting the leader’s supremacy.
Most people move past seeing themselves as the center of the world in their teen years, as I’ve discussed. But the idea of self in relationship to the world is often a lifelong challenge. Who doesn’t worry about how they’re coming off or if someone likes them? Well, likely Trump. Many artists use self-portraiture to help them deal with the complexities of human existence. Van Gogh is often noted as an avid self-portraitist. With their steady gaze and open expression, the portraits make the viewer feel as if they’re seeing the real Vincent. But this is the trick of his skill. The portraits are visually dynamic, with flourishes of color and calligraphic line work. Even in his portrait with a bandaged ear, Van Gogh’s interior state is hard to ascertain. In what could be an emotionally wrought image, Van Gogh creates a playful ode to Japanese art, with the print in the background and the asymmetric composition. Vincent, like many artists, employed portraiture as a formal tool to hone his craft. As Van Gogh said, “People say, and I am willing to believe it, that it is hard to know oneself, but it is not easy to paint oneself either." In spending untold hours looking at themselves, though, they’d also often find grounding and the space to focus. In a sense, if Trump had spent more time actually looking hard at himself, he’d be a different person altogether.
