The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics runs downstream of culture.” That seems to be part of why President Donald Trump has spent so much time in his second term trying to take control of American arts: because that’s the water that streams down into politics. If American politics is ever going to be purely Trumpian, American culture had better become so first.

Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to conduct a review that will leave it better aligned with his own understanding of arts and history. (He wants less focus, he’s said, on “how bad slavery was.”) He has installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center and called for an end to drag shows and so-called “woke” history. He cut federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sending ripple effects through the nation’s arts infrastructure. Some of the funding left in the NEA, Trump has earmarked for his own pet projects: a sculpture garden depicting Trump-approved national heroes (no abstract sculptors need apply); patriotic plays and concerts that are themed to America’s 250th anniversary.

As Trump grabs for influence over the American arts, he’s been straightforward in what he thinks it should look like. He likes big, bombastic, spectacle-driven work that is also fully representational, uncluttered by metaphors or symbolism. He wants nothing that might suggest that America has ever been less than great, except for when it was under Democratic leadership. He wants nostalgic Norman Rockwell-style Americana, not Kehinde Wiley. He doesn’t want Hamilton; he wants 1776, and not the all-female 1776 revival from a couple of years ago, either.

Trump isn’t being all that innovative here. The US government has meddled in American arts before. Most famously, the CIA spent decades during the Cold War funding some artists and literary magazines while surveilling and harassing others, the better to shape America’s image on the world stage. The CIA thought that politics were downstream of culture, too — especially when you and your enemy both have nuclear bombs and would like to avoid using them.

“In our eagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy of open war, ‘peaceful’ techniques will become more vital in times of pre-war softening up, actual overt war, and in times of post-war manipulation,” runs a CIA memo from 1945, anticipating the shift in tactics that the new atom bomb would necessitate. It was clear even this early on, writes historian Frances Stonor Saunders in her authoritative book The Cultural Cold War, that the “operational weapon” the US would use to fight the war with the Soviets “was to be culture.”

Putting the CIA’s cultural cold warfare next to Trump’s arts power grab is a surprisingly revelatory exercise. Previously, when institutions of the US government got mixed up in the arts world, it was usually because they believed it to be of existential importance how America is depicted in the art that it exported to the rest of the world. Going from the CIA to Trump to back again, we can see how America ran a propaganda war in the 1960s, and how it’s trying to do so again today, in 2025.

“Unite the free traditions of Europe and America”

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