Of course there is art about Trump

The following post dominated the discourse on Bluesky for an hour or two on Monday and drove me moderately insane.:

I blurred out OP's name because it's not my intention to be mean to a person who, for all I know, is a perfectly nice and smart guy who just hasn't spent very much time thinking about this question.

But yes, there absolutely has been art about "this moment." Some of it, like Andor (2022-25) is being released into the world as we speak. (Although season two of Andor was written and filmed before this moment – depending, of course, on where you choose to start the beginning point of "this moment.") There are others: The Penguin (2024), The Boys (2019-2026), and Watchmen (2019). I can even think of some that aren't based on comic books, like The Handmaid's Tale (2017-2025), The Regime (2024), and Civil War (2024). I haven't seen Sinners (2025) yet, but it seems a likely prospect!

During Trump 1 it was observed ad nauseum that Trump's rise to power bore many parallels to the rise of Voldemort in Harry Potter. If 1) we hadn't all gotten tired of that schtick eight years ago and 2) if J.K. Rowling hadn't subsequently lost her mind, I suspect we'd spend a lot more time noticing that, actually, it bears far more similarities to Trump 2. There are near-countless other examples of art that predates Trump we could draw upon, for the rise of fascism has been an ongoing source of fascination among artists and audiences for nigh on a century. Rowling and Tolkein and Philip K. Dick and all the rest don't predict Trump as much as they reflect Hitler. Here, it's Trump, not Hollywood, who is rebooting existing IP.

What each of these aforementioned entertainments lack is someone doing the equivalent of turning to face the camera and saying, "by the way, this is about Trump" (though The Boys sometimes comes close). There are many reasons for this. One of them is that I don't think anyone really wants to watch that right now, if ever. Another is that art about bad times often strives to contest our settled cultural memory of an event or reveal hidden injustices that were happening out of plain sight. Here, I'm thinking of It's A Sin (2021) and Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), which portray the AIDS epidemic (the series is set between 1981 to 1991) and the FBI's plot to murder Fred Hampton (1969). Part of what these stories do is reveal and contextualize historical injustices, packaging them for a mass audience previously unaware of (or having forgotten) how society treated these people, and inviting the viewer to notice parallels between these stories of the past and stories unfolding around them in the present.

"Hm. In 1981, we sure were awful to this one minority group that now enjoys broad social acceptance. Are there any analogies I might draw to current debates about who belongs and who doesn't?"

Almost by definition, stories like these require the passage of time. The Trump Era needs to end (to the extent that any era ever truly ends), and narratives about its role in the American story need to take shape. Only then can art contest those narratives directly.

I'm not saying it's not possible to do good art about Trump here and now. My wife shows me at least one #resistance TikTok a day, and from time to time they make me laugh. As much as it pains me to say so, TikToks are art! And if I could venture some informed speculation, I think that might be the core of the disconnect between OP's expectations for art that meets this moment and the art we're actually getting. We're a much more visual culture in 2025 than we were in the 1960s; there will be more influencers than poets and folk singers at the vanguard of the resistance.

As for more sophisticated forms of art, I think it's been demonstrated that there is already plenty! Does it matter that most of it predates Trump himself? I don't think so. Nothing about what Trump is doing is new. It's just new to us.