One explicit goal of the second Trump administration, if not its defining mission, is to undo the recent past and rewrite history to fit its own master narrative. By now it’s axiomatic that making America “great again” has never referred to any fixed point in the actual American past; it’s more like a mashup or highlight reel of random images taken from eras before any living American was born. We can see that vision embodied with startling literalness in the propaganda posters recently concocted by the Labor Department, such as the depiction of a whites-only church picnic apparently taking place in Uncanny Valley. If the rise of Donald Trump preceded the advent of AI slop, it may also have conjured it into existence: Never in cultural history have form and content been so perfectly matched.
We already know that Trump and his inner circle — which mostly means Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, the high priests of MAGA ideology — want to erase the gains of the civil rights movement, LGBTQ equality and feminism. But their true goals are far more ambitious, if less easy to define. This is a fake presidency devoted more to creating viral memes than shaping policy, and there’s no coherent or consistent narrative at work. Honestly, that’s less a flaw than a feature: The wholesale rejection of reality is central to the brand.
