There is a specter haunting American popular culture: the specter of Donald Trump.
In many cases, the president is quite literally a specter, insofar as an event comes to be defined by his very absence from it. Earlier this month, for example, it was widely noted—more noted, in fact, than anything about the performance itself—that he skipped rapper Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show at college football’s national championship game. He also blew off last December’s Kennedy Center awards, which feted, among others, LL Cool J, Norman Lear, and Lionel Richie. The New York Times, in turn, called them “The Trump-Less Kennedy Center Honors.” The White House Correspondents’ dinner was Trump-less as well, spurring a thousand tweets and anguished essays about what the president’s absence from the annual dinner meant for journalism and the presidency. And after the Oscars last February, a piece in the Atlantic noted, “Despite being 3,000 miles away, the president loomed larger in the Dolby Theatre than the Academy itself.”
It’s perhaps fitting that a year into his presidency, a man who for nearly his entire adult life has been a pop culture figure would in turn swallow up American pop culture after his election. And indeed, the number of cultural spaces we can safely label Trump Free Zones is shrinking rapidly.
Not all of this is new, of course. Politics has always been a persistent theme on late-night television talk shows, which rely on humdrum daily news bits to provide the grist of their comedy. And Saturday Night Live has long feasted on mediocre impersonations of political figures; the usually talented Alec Baldwin’s notably off-the-mark take on Donald Trump’s mannerisms and voice is nothing new.
But Trump—or rather his opponents’ distaste for him—is colonizing other, less predictable spaces. A summer Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar had a Trump stand-in in the title role. (Which, bizarrely, was kind of a compliment to the undisciplined, combat-avoiding president.) Heretofore not-particularly-political comedians like Marc Maron have become ideological warriors in their standup routines.
And wherever they possibly can, our cultural gatekeepers have tried to shoehorn in a Trump angle. The New York Times called Hillbilly Elegy one of six “books to help understand Trump’s win,” despite author J. D. Vance’s not mentioning the then-presidential candidate in the book once. Richard Russo’s wonderful new story collection Trajectory also does not name-check the 45th president. But the Washington Post nonetheless said it showed that “Russo completely understands Trump’s blue-collar supporters.” Everything is now Trump Lit apparently. Talented novelists like Howard Jacobson have been swallowed up by Trump, too; last year, the usually thoughtful writer slapped together Pussy, a not-particularly-clever satire of a (very) thinly-veiled Trump.
The president also dominates Hollywood as well as the critical apparatus that appraises it. With his election having spurred a newfound attention to race and racism, mediocre “message” movies like Get Out are routinely hailed as masterpieces. (One wonders how those reviews will read 10 years from now.) Arguably far fewer viewers would care about The Post—yet another movie about grizzled journalists seeking the Truth At Any Cost—were Mr. “Fake News” not president, yet in the current climate, the movie is a hit. Kathryn Bigelow’s otherwise woke Detroit—it deplores police brutality and has a largely black cast—was denounced nonetheless because of the race of its director: It was a “film by white people for white people,” one critic charged. This is increasingly what passes for criticism in the Trump era: “White people” are largely held responsible for having elected the president, so they are increasingly dissected under the cultural microscope.
It’s not just cultural products that are unremittingly Trump-focused. Artists themselves are being held to account for sins of commission and omission. The message is you’re either with the Resistance or you’re with Trump. Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel are celebrated for denouncing the president at various award banquets. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, the country-pop star, is excoriated. She has never expressed a public opinion on Trump one way or the other, though she has publicly supported liberal causes like gay rights for years, and that’s the problem. This makes her AWOL: For the mere act of not furiously denouncing Trump, the Guardian called Swift “an envoy for Trump’s values.” The implication is that she is not entitled to a private life; her political thoughts, whatever they might be, are essentially public property.
Of course, there have been moments of levity too. Witness Eminem’s hapless attempts to bait Donald Trump into insulting him by releasing a rap song bashing the president. “I was and still am extremely angry that Trump hasn’t responded on Twitter,” the rapper said on satellite radio. “I feel like he’s not paying attention to me. I was kind of waiting for him to say something, and for some reason, he didn’t say anything.”
The biggest development in pop culture over the last year has been the fallout from the #metoo movement. Sexual misconduct, or allegations thereof, has ended or indefinitely suspended the careers of cultural heavyweights like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, Louis C. K., Russell Simmons, and Tavis Smiley. (Dustin Hoffman and George Takei may survive it, but things look touch and go.)
But #metoo’s rise is, as well, attributable to Trump’s election. The reason for this is two-fold. The movement got its impetus from the exposure of Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator by the New York Times and the New Yorker. It’s unlikely this would have happened, or taken the same form, had Hillary Clinton been elected president, given the longstanding close relations between the Clintons and Weinstein.
And Trump’s election has spurred a newfound sensitivity to sexual harassment issues because multiple women have accused the president himself of misconduct. The ousting of Weinstein, Spacey, Rose, et al. is also, by proxy, a rebuke to Trump and the sexual entitlement he appears to represent. It’s an interesting irony that the election of an unabashedly non-feminist president has spurred the most consequential feminist movement in years.
If a little escapism is what you’re looking for when you turn on your TV, go to a concert, head to the movies—just a couple of politics-free hours—you may be out of luck until sometime after President Oprah Winfrey’s second term.
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of The Weekly Standard.
