The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell: Trump misuses the artist’s work—like other cultural icons—to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas.

If Rockwell’s early illustrations of pink-cheeked lovebirds and rough-housing kids were meant to comfort audiences, those latter works were meant to challenge them. His tool for achieving both ends, though, was the same: compassion. His works ooze it, whatever the subject and whichever the characters, and regardless of how subsequent opportunists might try to exploit those works.

Compassion of that sort is a virtue obviously absent from Trump’s mass deportation campaign—and arguably from MAGA overall. Which makes the use of Rockwell’s art an especially egregious misappropriation.

I wish I knew what Rockwell might have said about Trump’s theft of his life’s work in service of state-sponsored terror. But even more than that, I wonder what he would have painted.

Art and Trumpism don’t mix, unless you count AI slop, propaganda, and theft from artists. And kitsch with no awareness. Thomas Kincaid cookie tins that sing a song, with zero irony. For Christmas.

Why can’t he get his propaganda across with the art of Ben Garrison???

We truly cannot have shit in this house.

Nazis always steal art and culture because they can’t come up with anything more clever than “more of me.” Hell the only creative thing a Nazi has done in the last century was write the Harry Potter books.