President Donald Trump grips the knot of Robert Mueller’s necktie with a clenched left fist while his right hand shoves a magnifying glass into the special counsel’s face. President Barack Obama fiddles while Washington burns. Jesus walks away from the lectern after addressing a joint session of Congress; the assembled senators and representatives jeer at him.
These are just a few of the fantastical scenes depicted in the works of artist Jon McNaughton. The 50-year-old Utah-based painter’s latest work, Crossing the Swamp, re-creates Emanuel Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware with figures from today’s politics: The president and various advisers and cabinet members, mostly wearing camouflage, row through waters McNaughton describes as “laced with dangerous vermin, perfectly willing to destroy American prosperity for their personal ideologies and financial gain.” President Trump, in the George Washington position, carries a lantern; Nikki Haley is at the bow, clearing the way; John Bolton crouches with a shotgun.
After McNaughton made prints of his swamp scene available for purchase on his website, his whole oeuvre went viral: His apocalyptic Americana was widely shared on social media and discussed in major publications and TV. At a time when memes are a mainstay of so much of our political discourse—when photoshopped templates and poorly drawn images, eminently adaptable and easy to grasp, are shared by people of all generations—part of the reason McNaughton’s work has become a sensation is his clear investment of time. The painstaking nature of McNaughton’s work sets him apart from the crowd of amateurs and the Russian meme-propagating social-media hacks; here is a man not churning out hastily created GIFs but taking time and care to express his convictions. Moreover, the paintings may be the butt of jokes but they are not themselves intended as jokes. There is no irony here; to their maker they are authentic works of art capturing the danger and despair of our political moment. His authentic yearning invites the cynical to lambaste the paintings.
Although McNaughton and his work have reached new and wider audiences in recent days, he was not a wholly unknown quantity. His grimly anti-Obama paintings—like one from 2012 depicting the then-president, with a demonic visage, holding a burning Constitution—brought him some praise from the right. McNaughton developed enough of an audience, in fact, to catch the eye of Sean Hannity in 2012. Most people know Hannity as a political commentator, provocateur, and unapologetic supporter of Donald Trump, but the Fox News host’s true calling as an art connoisseur and critic has gone woefully underappreciated. Hannity is an avid McNaughton admirer; not only has he had the painter on his show but he has purchased a number of McNaughton’s original works.
The painter uses YouTube and Twitter to promote his art with a showmanship reminiscent of the Hudson River School’s excessively dramatic unveilings of paintings of the great American landscapes. McNaughton often releases videos to explain his art, accompanied by triumphal cinematic music. In the video for Crossing the Swamp, his voiceover rips into establishment Democrats, Never Trump Republicans, the deep state, and the “fake news media.” The string of right-wing talk-radio buzzwords not only conveys McNaughton’s conviction that these nefarious forces are doing all they can to harm America but signals to potential customers that his art is on the right side of history.
Not all of McNaughton’s paintings are political; he sells prints of warm, kitschy scenes in the style of Thomas Kinkade; earnest depictions of biblical vignettes; and pictures of Mormon temples. (McNaughton is himself a Mormon.) But it’s his political and patriotism-themed paintings that have brought him the most notoriety—and presumably income. They are occasionally likened, by both admirers and critics, to the paintings of Norman Rockwell, but the comparison demeans and mischaracterizes Rockwell, whose paintings capture a supple human expressiveness entirely absent from the stiff, flat, uninteresting faces McNaughton paints. Moreover, Rockwell’s work—from his sentimental illustrations to his political paintings—reveals a deep affection for America, while McNaughton’s reliance on heavy-handed symbolism reveals a grim determination to behold his country not as it is but as it is characterized in alarmist right-wing broadcasting.
From a sales perspective, it’s a shame McNaughton didn’t wait until Christmas to start promoting Crossing the Swamp, although he has said he has ideas for other art to sell for the holiday season. The timing is peculiar in another way: Given the historical significance of the original painting celebrating George Washington’s greatest military victory, what great victory is McNaughton’s painting commemorating? It would seem to make more sense after some grand political victory, but given the investigations now looking into President Trump’s campaign and the worrisome midterm outlook for his party, McNaughton’s painting seems somewhat desperate in its symbolic register.
Crossing the Swamp is hagiographical in its depiction of Trump, a shift from McNaughton’s blunter caricature-like portrayal in Expose the Truth, the painting in which the president is menacing Robert Mueller in the chamber of the House of Representatives. Back in May, when McNaughton released Expose the Truth, the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse spent some time with him in Utah. Despite the painter’s heavy use of #MAGA rhetoric on YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere, he demurred when Hesse tried to pin down his motivations and political leanings. Still, Hesse nails why McNaughton matters: “It’s pure id art. Which means, in the sense that art can reveal truths about the undercarriage of the psyche, McNaughton is one of the most significant painters of the current era.”
McNaughton maintained in the Post interview that his paintings are about the people who elected President Trump—sometimes symbolized in his works as a forlorn “forgotten man”—and not a declaration of fealty to Trump himself or his party. Hesse was left to ponder whether the paintings are just a way to capitalize on the Trump phenomenon. In our summer of grift, is he just another savvy con artist out to make a buck?
This is not a convincing hypothesis; it is difficult to imagine that the painter of Crossing the Swamp and proprietor of McNaughton’s Twitter account possesses any ironic detachment whatsoever from his work. He is no longer as ambivalent—or coy—about his regard for the president as he was with the Washington Post in May. “I paint what I feel needs to be said about the current state of our country,” he says in his promotional video for Crossing the Swamp. “My hope is that Trump will be remembered as the president who restored American greatness. I want to be on that boat crossing the swamp.” For all the own-the-libs postmodern irony of young conservatives today, McNaughton at least is sincere and can claim to capture the zeitgeist of populist rage.
Derided by critics for his work’s propagandistic quality, McNaughton is unfazed. “I’ve become kind of the whipping boy of the art world,” he said during a local news segment. Then he smiled and shook his head: “But I don’t care.” Do you?
