NO ONE BELIEVES HE'S CONSERVATIVE:

Long before Trump had his Non-Fungible Token (NFT) digital trading card collection, he had acquired a favorite painter, Jon McNaughton. A few weeks ago, McNaughton released a video in honor of Trump's new bid for a second term at the helm of the United States government. It overlays McNaughton's famous images--Trump, head bowed, being blessed by Frederick Douglass; a muscled citizen gripping an American flag and a semiautomatic rifle-with clips from the ex-president's dour announcement speech:  "We will be resisted by ... the Marxist radicals."

What's strange about the montage is how unmistakably Communist the MAGA court artist is in his style. In his techniques and themes, McNaughton's paintings are literally socialist-realist propaganda posters. His image of Trump clutching an American flag imitates a classic North Korean painting. His depictions of lone citizens atop horses, hoisting flags, mimic late Soviet propaganda posters. His depictions of fat-cat elites and languishing common men are near-direct copies of Maoist and Bolshevik propaganda depictions of the "enemies of the state."

Maybe Bolshevik art is the only art MAGA's top painter has ever seen for inspiration. But I don't think it's just a comic coincidence. One of Trump's most popular new NFTs is eeriely--though probably inadvertently-- reminiscent of the iconic Soviet poster "The Victory of Communism Is Inevitable." Of all artistic movements, Trumpist art was likeliest to channel socialist realism because Trumpism as a philosophy has a great deal in common with socialist realism, no matter how much it condemns "radical Marxism" for rally boo-lines. Communism derives its authority from by casting the existing establishment as the enemy, even after it gains power. My father, Charles Fairbanks, former director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (and a contributor to The UnPopulist), spent a lifetime studying Communism. He recently noted to me that Mao Zedong actively encouraged a people's rebellion against his own government. "That is also what Trump does. It may be startling to realize this parallel because Trump calls himself a conservative. But Trump from the very start has insisted that the American government he wants to run will always be an enemy," my dad wrote.

Soviet Communism undermined itself after it seized power because it had to constantly refresh itself by: one, making incoherent claims of its own victimhood and, two, sowing divisions among genuine communities by identifying new enemies--the rural bourgeoisie, the 'Old Bolsheviks,' the Jews. Likewise, Trump's fanboy, McNaughton, laments that his idol's comeback won't be "easy,"  because literally everyone is Trump's enemy: "He's been trashed by the media, hunted by the Deep State ... and [now] blocked by both Republicans and Democrats."

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