How art might have saved Trump from himself

A report card for Trump’s presidency from the Guardian last week graded him on Russia, healthcare, taxes, the environment, and immigration. And while there were no passing grades, his attitude toward race stands out as particularly disgraceful.

Squaring the oval

Trump was in the Oval Office for only a week when he signed an executive order to keep those born in Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Other affronts to minorities that followed under his leadership included his refusal to denounce the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, his slow response to Puerto Rico’s call for help after hurricane Maria, and his condemnation of black football players for taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

And to top off his first year, he opted to zap Daca (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program), which will exile some 700,000 “Dreames.”

Tweeting tyranny

Trump defended himself against criticism for his bigotry by tweeting, “I am the least racist person on Earth.” Clearly he never read “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s allegory about a power-hungry pig called Napoleon; otherwise he might have recognized himself in the tale’s most famous line: “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Napoleon’s appetite for power over his fellow farm animals grew to such a pitch that he ousted the farmer who owner the place, moved into his house, slept in his bed and began walking on his hind legs.

It wasn’t long before you couldn’t tell the difference between man and pig. Trump is the pig Napoleon on Manor Farm. If he had read Orwell’s tale, ranked by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels, he might have understood how ridiculous his stance on race is.

The big picture

Granted, not everyone is into the literary arts, but the pictorial arts could have easily informed Trump.

Yet, even despite his long residency in New York, he didn’t frequent the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he could have come across Ben Shahn’s graphic “Laissez-Faire,” a depiction of a policeman with his back turned as a white man attacks a black man. Even a casual glance at this work would have taught Trump a lesson about racism.

Shahn learned the lesson early. As he told the Magazine of Art, “I hate injustice. I guess that’s the only thing I’ve hated ever since I read a story in school and I hope I go on hating it all my life.”

The missing piece

That could have been Trump’s story. But as Art News reported in 2016, despite Trump’s wealth, he is not acculturated. Unlike other wealthy public figures, he never patronizes any of the city’s major cultural institutions: “Since the beginning of his career, Trump has been, at best, apathetic to the arts in New York, and elsewhere.” And it shows.