Dear Donald,

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to you and gave you some advice on how to use art to your advantage (because you really, really should...people respond to creativity like moths to a lamp, and believe me, you need practice in pretending to be a lamp). I hope that you took what I wrote to heart (or penis, or whatever you consider to be the center of your being) and that you act on that advice in the coming weeks (and boy, do I mean ‘coming weeks.’ You’re going to want to move before the dangerous artists have a chance to mobilize.) It is absolutely critical that you use everything at your disposal to unify the country around you, and only you, because that is the only way this country will know prosperity, and that is something we desperately need (don’t fact-check me on that...not that I’m concerned you will, and not that you should, since I’m getting that information from you, but if you do perchance happen to do some research on the Internet, you might find a lot of highly respectable news sources disagreeing with me (you)).

But I would like to explore art a little more in-depth in this letter. More specifically, I’d like to elaborate on why art is important to you politically and personally (we are talking about art, here).

This will be a more thorough and nuanced analysis than what I wrote last time, so please do what you need to prepare to read this. Schedule breaks, get someone to make sure you tweet only so many times, get someone else to break this down into language you can understand, and perhaps record someone else else reading it out loud to you, so that you revisit what you forgot (and there will be a test—your Presidency—so study up!). My hope is that this analysis will help you to implement a strictly Pro-Trump art policy.

Now, one ought not to dabble with art unless one understands one’s relationship with it. Please accept this humble and genuinely sincere to help you understand your relationship with art.

When you were little—in first grade, let’s say—you and your class of rich people went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and I’m taking some liberties with your life—I hope you don’t mind (I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind, that I put down in words, how wonderful life is, now you’re in the world...great song, pertinent song, great song (pertinent is a word that means ‘relating to Donald Trump’)) I am doing what I can to help Americans have an accurate and holistic understanding of you, you wonderfully complicated man). You were in a class of twenty or twenty-one or so, and the day was beautiful.

Well, sort of. It was raining horrifically violently, but—and this is where this letter finds most of its ‘oomph’—but you were the best raincoat the world had to offer, while the other brats in your class were shivering and wiping snot away from their quivering faces, you were warm and almost perfectly dry (and completely snot-free!) Seeing the other people suffer while you were perfectly okay is what made the day beautiful (and that’s the ‘oomph.’ Everything’s hunky-dory for Donald Trump if you are happy while other people are miserable. Which is okay! Great leaders want everyone else around them to suffer. Shows a real strength of character.)

After you walk in through some mediocre doors that look like that were made by a group of drunk rednecks, and after you complain about the heat being too strong—“Why didn’t you tell them about my new raincoat?”—(such a precious child) you look around and see a bunch of fancy paintings painted by dead poor people.

“Daddy always says that painters are suckers,” you say loudly.

“Shh, Donald,” your teacher says.

“You hush,” you say. The class laughs. Your teacher rolls her eyes and turns to the tour guide with the big boobs that’s walking towards you.

“Hey, Don,” another student says to you. He points to a nearby painting. “That guy has the same color hair as you.”

“And he looks nicer than you,” you say. The student steps back, hurt.

“Hey!” you shout. You point to the same painting the other student was just pointing at. “That guy has the same color hair as me!”

The teacher smiles her approval, and you stare giddily at the painting while you a certain part of you starts to harden (well, two parts. I suspect that your heart started to harden at a similarly young age.)

As the morning goes on, and the tour guide is droning on about this painting by

such-and-such important sucker and that-and-that important sucker, you become increasingly fascinated with the marble columns and the ornamental mirrors. Even though it is faint, you can see your reflection in the marble columns, and boy, do you love what you see. At one point, you grab a nearby classmate by the shoulder and pull him towards you, make him look at your reflection, and whisper in his ear “You’ll never be as good-looking as me.”

The student starts crying, and you say to the teacher “Brian punched Jordan again.” (Brian has a history of punching Jordan, and also of lying to get out of trouble, so this works nicely in your favor. And you know that the teacher’s a little afraid of you, so this works doubly nicely.)

The tour guide keeps talking. You hear her say something about “the importance of art in expressing one’s self...”

“How did they know what I wanted?” you ask, and the whole class laughs, and you get angry because you’re being serious—you really did paint all those paintings!

(On a rational level, you understand that you did not, but on an emotional level, you don’t understand that a world can exist without your permission, so, in your mind, you really did paint those paintings because that’s the only way they could have come into existence.)

As you move along, you hear the guide talking, droning on and on about style and this-and-that era and this-and-that artist, and your imagination starts to take flight. Suddenly, the corridor is not filled with paintings of boring people, but paintings of you. The statues, too, are of you, and every floor tile is emblazoned with a towering Trump “T.”

Most important of all, all of the visitors are bowing to your portraits. No, they are praying to your portraits. They are lighting candles in front of your portraits while a men’s choir sings, somewhere in the Museum of You, “Alleluia!”

“Donald, we’re leaving,” your teacher calls.

The rest of your class has pulled ahead of you, leaving you in front of a decorative mirror. My, you look handsome.

You reluctantly break away from the mirror and go after your class, plotting how you’re going to buy the museum and turn it into a massive monument to the only thing that deserves to be adulated, exalted, worshipped, painted, sculpted, and seen: good ol’ you.

The artists will, of course, have to be the most talented artists the world has to offer, and also the biggest suckers. They can’t expect to get paid in anything other than the pride of seeing their work on display, and even then, they’ll have to make do with a rather watered down pride, since seeing one’s work appear beside another one’s work that looks astonishingly similar will be, at the very least, mildly disappointing.

Or they’ll have to be so desperate, that they won’t mind having made basically the same portrait as another artist.

Still, they’ll be suckers toiling away for your glory, and then, once it’s complete, the tour guide, your teacher, and your classmates will all be bowing to you the way they should be each and every day.

I’m going to go ahead and venture a guess that you’re not too overly fond of art. What use is watercolor to you when you have money that needs to be made? That, and it’s a constant reminder that there are sources of beauty in the world that aren’t you. Art helps people to fall in love with the world, and the more people that are falling in love with the world, they less they are falling in love with you, and the less dependent they are on you for your happiness. Think of the horrors that would unfold if your children had learned at any point in their young lives that they could just wander over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art if they wanted to feel good about themselves. Anarchy! Chaos! Withholding affection from them would no longer be an effective way of controlling them.

Need I also mention how threatened you are by art? Because not being the center of people’s attention is bad enough, but it also threatens you in other ways. When someone creates a work of art, they are exercising their independence of thought. They are showing to the world that they have a mind, and that they are able to use their talents to convey their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives to the world. As you cannot tolerate the idea that people of mental lives independent of yours (and why should they? You’re amazing.), art reminds you daily of just how little control you have over peoples’ spirits.

That, and it reminds you of just how little creativity you have. You claim to have a big self, but we both know that the whole “I’m awesome” shpeel is a sad attempt to cover up a gaping emptiness at the center of your being. You can’t stand seeing other people express themselves because it is literally impossible for you to express yourself. The best you can do is dazzle and awe people with your personality, but that’s dramatically different from the artist’s decision to sit down, plumb the depths of their being, and create a masterpiece from the chaos of their existence.

AND, art helps to bring people closer together. You claim that you are a great unifier, but have you seen a Billy Joel concert? Have you seen the looks on peoples’ faces, heard their voices after looking at Starry Night? No, art brings people in touch with something inside of them that is not usually accessed on a daily basis, and, in doing so, helps us to see that same something in other people. By building connections within us, art helps us to connect with other people, and build a stronger society.

In other words, art is everything that you’re not. Independent, creative, beautiful, healing, unifying, etc etc, and you are threatened by it. But since art can never be eradicated from society, what you need is a society where you aren’t just comfortable with art, but where art actively helps you and your political cause.

Let’s talk about what you would have to do to create that kind of society.

I could talk about an infinite number of art’s qualities, but for the purposes of this particular letter, I’m going to look solely at its implications for self-expression, its beauty and the impact it has on our understanding of beauty, and its ability to unify people. These three qualities strike me as the three most immediately important aspects of art...or, well, of the relationship that exists between human beings and art. I say relationship because art cannot be of any significance unless it is imbued with significance by a human being, and, arguably, human beings cannot have any significance unless they have art to help them understand that significance (which, as evidenced by everything you do, you have in abundance, an understanding of your own self-worth.).

I also think that the framework of ‘relationship’ will be particularly helpful for us here. You are an expert at relationships. Conventional? No, but that’s not a problem, because nothing about you is conventional. Your understanding of relationships is going to be of particular use to us, because, somehow or another, you can turn any relationship into one that benefits you.

Rosie O’Donnell’s a perfect example. She hates you, and because she hates you, you hate her. But it doesn’t just stop there. Because she hates you, she is a prime target for you, and for your supporters. (Twitter is a really wondrous thing). You hate her, millions of people hate her, and that’s millions of people who sympathize with you, which means that they, because you are the businessman you are, are also millions of people who can easily be called upon to defend you. Out of your relationship with Rosie O’Donnell, you get sympathy, and you get people who will go mad to protect you (just don’t ask them to take a bullet. Their concern for you is purely transactional, just like your concern for their interests in, say, “locking her up” and “building that wall” was purely transactional. I’m sure you don’t understand, but have your counselor explain it to you.)

And so it shall be with art! A thing to be used for your own advantage! But, Sir, what IS art? Because, after all, we must know what we are dealing with before we go on, no?

Well, art is that which allows us to soar, to touch the sky, to fulfill our wildest dreams, blah de blah de blah. You don’t care, I don’t care.

Much more pressing questions are “What does art do for people?” and “why has it been a part of our society for so long?” and “Why do people insist on having relationships with it?”

The answer to these questions is somewhat complicated. We know that works art must serve some sort of function, otherwise human societies would not insist on creating them. Owing to the variety of places in which it is used, we know that it serves multiple functions. We also know that since every person approaches art from a different background, it de facto serves billions of functions. A landscape painting might suggest infinite possibility for one person and terrifying agoraphobia for another. A Picasso might represent innovation for one artist, and insanity for another.

You get the idea.

For our purposes, though, I’m going to assume that art exists so that people can express that little thing in each of us that yearns to be felt and heard by the world (this isn’t QUITE self-expression...the three qualities I listed earlier are being considered as incidental to this one. Art helps us to understand beauty, brings us together, and allows us to express ourselves because of it’s function as an outlet for something terribly fragile inside each of us). I’m also going to assume that this little thing, this little voice, is inherently vulnerable, and fragile, and without proper care, can be easily drowned out and ignored (but never killed).

If that is the reason art exists, to express this fragile and vulnerable voice inside each of us, it follows that under a totalitarian regime, where people are told how to act and how to feel, there will always be surge of art, coming from people who refuse to let this voice be silenced by the goosesteps around them, which means that the art that “wears at its heart the fire’s center” will always be opposed to the regime.

It does not follow, however, that the mass of people will be swayed by this art, or that they will come into touch with the voice that they allowed to be silenced. That is a possibility, but it is not guaranteed. The beauty of totalitarian regimes is that they deceive the people into believing that their best interests lie with the State, that that little voice inside everyone is actually clamoring for the State to assume control of every aspect of their lives. People inevitably learn that the State was manipulating them in order to seize power, but by the time they realize this, the State has either become too powerful for any resistance to be effective, or the people have become too apathetic and resigned to take collective action, or both. Meanwhile, the real artists, the ones who have learned how to communicate with that little voice inside of them and reach the little voice inside everyone else, have been exterminated or forced into hiding, leaving no one BUT the State who can claim to understand the deepest fears and hopes of the people.

Which is something that you are already quite good at doing, so this is shaping up nicely for you.

How, though, do you get from point A—Donald Trump in a world surrounded by critical and free-flowing art—to Point B—Donald Trump in a world where he is the sole artistic authority?

Well, let’s start by thinking briefly about the roles that art occupies in society. First, we’ve got it as the hobby of thousands of high-schoolers, and the would-be profession of thousands of college students. Second, it’s a fun activity that school-age children participate in, one that has no real merit beyond its function as something “non-school-related.” Third, it’s displayed on street corners and in parks to draw people’s attention to some social cause in the most superficial of ways. Fourth, it’s displayed in museums, ostensibly to preserve the memory of the past, but museums are more often than not used as diversions from everyday life and as ways to ‘develop one’s artistic sensibility’ so that one can sound refined at cocktail parties. Fifth, it’s used by companies to remind its workers of the company’s ‘values’ and to show the world how much the firm values ‘creativity.’ Sixth, it’s used to distract and entertain people, in the form of Internet memes, GIFs, light comedies, action movies, and books that are typically classified as ‘non-literary,’ and ‘dance/party music.’ Seventh, it’s used to heighten one’s sensitivity to the world around one’s self, in the form of well-made movies, sharp political satire, books that are typically classified as ‘literature,’ well-made music, well-made television shows, and well-made sculptures and paintings (whether or not this functions are fulfilled depends on the individual. I’m stating the intent behind the existence of these types of art. A Clive Cussler novel might very well move an individual the same way Anna Karenina moves another.). Eighth, to drown out the world (think of iPods on the subway, or music being played to calm one’s mind and not because one wants to actively listen to it.).

This list is in no-way comprehensive, but it is helpful to think about the ways society currently uses art before attempting to figure out how art can be used to promote an individual such as yourself. What you’ll notice is that art more often than not serves a purpose outside of that which can be considered ‘artistic.’ That is, I think that more often-than-not, in our modern world, art does not help people to learn how to express themselves, help them to understand beauty, or bring them closer together; what I think it does instead is serve a multitude of utilitarian purposes that deaden people to its potency. Beethoven’s Ninth cannot move someone to tears when it’s being played to give one some background noise while one is cleaning dishes (Neither can Bach’s Cello Suites be REALLY moving if one is playing them to stave off loneliness while one is writing a particularly heady article...completely random example, not sure where that came from.)

This is going to be helpful to you, because people are already used to experiencing art as a means to accomplish something, and not as something that just EXISTS (modernity abhors anything that can’t immediately or easily justify its existence, like genuine art, or a genuine contemplation of art.). What you need to do, then, as someone who’s practiced at exploiting the worst possible elements in people, and as someone who knows how to manipulate appearances in order to avoid betraying a complete absence of substance, and as someone who’s so good at getting the people around you to either worship you or silently watch you do your thing, is to not try and convince people to see the inherent value of art, or to gain a deeper appreciation of it, but rather convince them that the only art worth caring about is art that praises you, while encouraging them to not think too deeply about what art is supposed to do for people. Only by encouraging the masses to take art at its surface can you convince them to let you create a society where you are the sole artistic genius and the sole muse for the nation’s artists.

If we can go back to the museum trip for a moment (or, well, more than a moment)—I think that part of the reason you were so bored in the museum is because you don’t know what it’s like to ‘express yourself,’ not really, I mean, and the thought of other people doing it is completely foreign to you. I need to emphasize that when I say “express yourself,” I don’t mean “give that little voice inside of you a chance to speak to the world,” although the chances of you having one are infinitesimal. What I mean is “using art in such a way that it captures our personalities and makes us realize why we are different from the rest of the world.” “Expressing oneself” is not meant to bring unity to people. It’s a way of thinking about one’s self that elevates one above the rest of the herd.

Most would argue that you do this already. Except you don’t, Sir. What you do is you project onto the world an image of strength, wealth, mightiness, etc etc, because that’s how you want people to see you. What you are expressing, then, is a grossly outsized version of other peoples’ perceptions of you, and not your perception of yourself. Pretending for a moment that you are psychologically capable of showing to the world what YOU think of yourself, if you were to walk into a room with a painting that you made in order to ‘express yourself,’ I’m pretty sure what people would see is a starving baby reach up to an engorged breast that is just beyond its reach. A starving, infantile Tantalus, pretty much.

Since this is the version of you that you would create if you had any self-awareness, it’s perfectly understandable that you spend your time forcing other people to believe that you’re the biggest and the best. You can’t take any pride in your own conception of yourself. Man, that sucks.

People who use art to express themselves have something you don’t, then—a fairly healthy self-image, or at least a willingness to admit to themselves and the world what their self-image is. That’s something you simply cannot allow. Imagine what that would do to your rule, having people running around, confidently expressing themselves. (No, seriously, picture it—everyone would have canvases set up everywhere, and they’d all be running up and down the streets with paintbrushes in their hands, screaming like excited babies, and slapping those paintbrushes on any canvas they see. It would be pandemonium! Of course, if you were so inclined, you could have designated “self-expression days” where this kind of scenario plays out in a controlled environment. If you do decide to do that, though, might I recommend outlawing pussy-grabbing so that all of those nasty male impulses can be channeled into a wild orgy of self-expression? That way, you’d be delegitimizing the selves that are being expressed by making them nothing more than bundles of pent up libido and hormones. Big whoop. And you’d secure the confidence of women, too. You’re going to need that when they realize what a Trump Presidency means for their rights. Distracting them by outlawing pussy-grabbing is the way to go.)

And, besides, they have something you don’t, self-confidence, so it is an inclination that must be dealt with.

But, remember, the idea is to create a world where art is used to adulate you. I believe that in my last letter on art, I exhorted to treat artists the way you treated your children—punish them for expressing anything that isn’t you, or love of you, except with the nation’s artists, instead of spanking them or insulting them or withholding affection, you can just smear them on twitter, or convince your followers not to support the artist, or...I don’t know...punish businesses that purchase the artist’s work. There are ways to curb non-Trump art without explicitly banning it. I believe I already touched upon this, but it bears repeating—people will react extremely negatively to an explicit ban on art. You need to be crafty about how you do it.

Like, not only do you need to punish artists for expressing anything that isn’t you, you need to create a class of artists that will willingly express themselves using you. Most decent artists won’t go for it—but you don’t need decent artists. You just need art of you, and an inability on the part of the public to discriminate between good art and bad art. They need not know it’s of poor quality. (Think of Huxley’s society in Brave New World. The people who are being oppressed have no idea that they’re being oppressed. You need to create that kind of mentality vis-a-vis art. It already exists on a societal level, but that’s a matter for another time.)

How do you go about doing this, exactly? Well, there are a few already-existing avenues that you can exploit. First among them is the Patriotic Propaganda line. We have seen over the years that it is possible, through sheer inundation, to cause the American public to associate two completely disparate ideas, and become radically convinced that the one necessarily means the other. For example, why is the National Anthem sung before sporting events? Does it need to be? Are sports inherently nationalistic? No, sports are inherently fun before anything else, but, somehow or another—I’m not sure of the exact history—they’ve been appropriated by the Patriotic Propaganda Machine. If you are a lover of sports, then you are also a lover of America.

Devotion to God is also associated with the patriotism that comes from sports. I’m not sure why, but it seems that a lot of devoted sports fans who are fervently patriotic are also fervently religious, and usually of the Christian variety. And just listen to popular patriotic songs—how many references to God and country do you hear in them? A lot! And the Pledge of Allegiance essentially confirms that the patriotic version of America is one that is essentially religious. It’s considerably harder to argue that one is a patriot if one is Atheist than it is if one is a Protestant.

America=sports=God=patriotism. Pretty simple formula. You’re already doing a nice job of capitalizing on it. The whole ‘Make America Great Again’ thing was a brilliant way to associate yourself with the America that is usually envisioned in the America-sports-God trinity. And I couldn’t be fonder of the way you positioned yourself as America’s savior by exaggerating just how bad things were. Brilliant, Sir, brilliant!

With regards to art, though, the question facing you, Sir, is “How do you convince an artist that their sense of self is dependent on you?”

Well, you don’t, because, again, no true artist would let you corrupt them like that.

What you do instead is you speak to the people who are depending on you to ‘Make America Great Again,’ and you tell them to start ‘expressing themselves’ to ‘liberal America.’ Make sure they know that one does not need to be skilled to be an artist, heavens no. One just needs to have an urge to say something to the world. Forget practice and art skill. Passion is all that’s needed.

Sir, your followers will be walking into supermarkets and chain stores and unapologetically belting out songs that remind black people of their place in society and poems that take power away from women and give it back to the men, their necessary masters. You will hear the Evangelist churches preaching about how you are giving the parishioners the freedom to speak their minds again. You will see red-state artists making shirts with patriotic Trump designs and displaying large portraits of you at county fairs. It might take a year or two, but before you know it, people will be expressing themselves by using you and your ideas, and the liberal elite will be torn from their Ivory Towers, and the people of the hearth shall rule the society!

Imagine, no more art museums! No more people telling us what to think, what to feel, and what to wear (to quote the great Charlie Chaplin)! No more ‘high-brow literature!’ No more fancy music! No more smartass show-offs! Just freedom, and expression, and art of the people! An art fueled by the lowest elements within each artist, since you can only bring out the worst in people, and created without concern for craft, because how dare so-called experts tell us the correct way to paint a watercolor! Did Da Vinci have someone telling him what to do? Was Picasso ‘graded’ and ‘judged?’ Heck, Van Gogh was dismissed as a sad lunatic, and look at what happened to him! The great American Renaissance is almost here. Our nation’s up-and-coming artists just need ‘a little push’ (to quote Heath Ledger’s Joker. He is referring to madness—“Madness, as we know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.”—but I think it’s applicable to the kind of art people will be creating to honor you, and the kind of mentality that will go into that art. Oh yes, Donald, the art that people create for you will be so different from everything that came before it. It will mirror your personality, something that I suspect you very much like the sound of. You are unpredictable, wild, charismatic, brazen, and extremely concerned with how people see you. You have defied expectations, and you are on course for shaking up Washington in ways that, truly, no one has done before. Trump art will do the same thing—it will become successful by virtue of being so uncouth, so untamed, so itself. It will not be concerned with how others have done art. Normally, as you know, artists build off one another. But the Trump artists will have the liberty to go where no artist has gone before, to plumb the depths of their souls for inspiration and call everything they produce a masterpiece, and fight anyone who says otherwise. You are empowering a whole group of people who would otherwise be unable to make it in the art world to first become artists, and then to break into the art world by rewriting the rules of art.)

Beauty was once a quality that art NEEDED to have. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all, and, you know, perhaps people will get used to the kind of beauty that your supporters will be expressing (oh I cannot wait! You know how the beatniks came to be the embodiment of self-expression and self-love and all that jazz, and how their rebellious spirit spilled over into the left-side of politics, and liberals became forever associated with a mentality that prioritizes the self over the rest of the world? Your supporters are poised to do that exact same thing with your ideology! Trumpism is the new liberalism! It’s about time your people had a chance to be unabashedly self-righteous, am I right?). But before they do, it’s worth thinking about what beauty previously meant in art, and how beauty is not just a quality that art has, but rather a certain outlook that art helps us to have and sustain.

Going back to the Greeks, beauty in art was all about symmetry and geometry. Everything had to conform to a set of mathematical rules in order to be considered beautiful. The Romans come along, and it’s more of the same thing. (I’m only looking at the art of the West, mind you. Early Middle Eastern art dazzled, as did Egyptian Art, and Persian art. I’m not sure how devoted they were to mathematics, though. I do know that the Greeks were very deliberate, and I’m using them because a) I’m more familiar with them and b) because their systematic style offers a wonderful counterpoint to your free-wheeling chaos.) And then the Dark Ages, which weren’t really dark, there was just no centralized power—sort of? My history of the area’s a little spotty. The Catholic Church did fill a vacuum, but to what extent, I’m not sure—and marked by the construction of Cathedrals—you wanna compete with the architectural geniuses of history? Stop with the stupid phallic skyscrapers and build a fucking Gothic Cathedral. Come on, man, have you seen the Cathedral at Reims. OMG gorgeous.—and of paintings that had lots of color but little personality. I’m not quite sure how it took civilization several thousand years to have the ability to paint perspective—like, that’s the kind of thing that’s so commonplace now it’s hard to imagine a world without it—but several thousand years it did in fact take, and that’s when the Renaissance comes along. The use of perspectives in art, the development of refined painting techniques, Leonardo Da Vinci, an increased interest in the natural world, Leonardo Da Vinci, the construction of elaborate palaces and mansions, Leonardo Da Vinci—dude, seriously, step it up. Your skyscrapers got nothing on the Castle of Chantilly, and your genius is nothing compared to that of Leonardo Da Vinci. The man was a natural wonder, a force of nature, something the likes of which we will probably never see again.—and then some more stuff happens, we get Impressionism, Dadaism, abstract expressionism (and some Jingoism...probably not a coincidence that was developing at the same time as abstract expressionism.), modernism, post-modernist chaos, and now. That’s art history in a nutshell.

Each era had its own idea of beauty, and they each engendered an outlook of beauty in the viewing public. For the Renaissance artists, beauty lay in celebrating nature exactly as it was, and thanks to their efforts, the public learned to see the world as beautiful. For the abstract expressionists (think Picasso), the world that one saw didn’t matter as much as the idea one had of the world, and the idea that the artists conveyed was one in which the world was fractured and broken, and the public began to see the world as one that was fractured and broken. A later of abstractionists saw the world as something that had to be interpreted in order to be understood, and they began to create art that demanded a cognitive effort on the part of the viewer that previous eras had not.

The world is beautiful, the world is broken, the world exists in the space between the physical world and the interpretation one has of that world. Three different conceptions of beauty. Admittedly the abstractionist concept is a little bleak, and probably can’t really be considered beauty, but it did influence the outlook of a generation.

You stand poised to make art do the same for you. And I do mean ‘make art’—as I’ve repeatedly said, no sane artist will want to do anything that praises you. You need to forcibly mold the art world into the greatest of mirrors, the most vibrant of reflective surfaces, strip it of its independence, its free-flowing nature, its necessary chaos, and turn it a machine that will show you and all you hope to for America in their most splendid colors.

You’re going to have to eventually regiment all art curriculums, from Pre-K up through Graduate School, give them a list of techniques they can and cannot use, a list of subjects they can and cannot paint. They will accuse you of being restrictive at first, but then they will see that there’s a whole universe contained within the boundaries laid by you (I think this will be a double-win for you, because it will be the first time you’ve ever demonstrated an understanding on the concept of boundaries), ranging from an America emerging from destruction and stepping into the light (containing perhaps variations on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, with such vivid imagery as a bruised Lady Liberty crawling out of a cave, from whose mouth pours the smoke of the fire that destroyed America—set by Obama, of course. For any artists interested, have a monkey with a match somewhere in the painting. People willl get the idea—and into the light reflected from the perfectly polished side of one of your towering Towers; or perhaps of Uncle Sam, brought back to life in a hospice room by an IV bag filled with Trump medicine) to classic scenes of American life being redone to illustrate how you are taking America’s history and, in a very Orwellian fashion, shaping it into something that fits your narrative of America (imagine a re-do of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in which the diners are all laughing at a TV screen showing Hillary Clinton going to jail; or of American Gothic, in which the farmer and his wife are very distinctly mid-Westerners who have become unemployed due to globalization), and still to glorious portraits and depictions of you (a portrait of your conquest of America, inspired by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, where you are waving an American flag while standing on a pile of a bunch of dead hipsters; or of you posing in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan while a golden sunset falls on the scene—although that one might be too complicated for any artist willing to contribute to your movement. They’re better off following your lead in taking someone else’s ideas and recycling them so well that they seem like new ones.). They’ll eventually come around to seeing that there’s a whole world of possibilities for them.

Of course, in order to implement that kind of control over the art world, the art world must first get on board with your agenda, because otherwise, you’re going to see and hear a bunch of people shouting and yelling about ‘free speech’ and whatnot (ugh. Isn’t is so annoying when journalists and liberals scream for free speech? Like, shut up. No one wants to hear you and your political correctness. Just let us be foul and get on with your lives.) The way you do that is by doing what I mentioned earlier—empower your supporters to the point where they can ‘express themselves’ without fear of consequence. And the way you do that is by abusing the media into selling a narrative about how the white-working class deserves a chance to speak up and be heard because it’s been stomped on for so long by the liberal elite. You know, portray people who probably deserve to be silenced as victims (pretending to be the victim is something you’re awfully good at. Your best talent, in my opinion.) because then, they can use their ‘victimhood’ as leverage against people who would prefer to hear them shut up and start saying PC things they don’t really believe. No one’s going to tell a victim to be quiet (certainly not the liberals. They’re suckers for that kind of talk.).

It will help them to have the national media on their side, too. Just make sure the media stays biased in their favor, and that it never does any REAL analysis, because a REAL analysis will nuance the problem of white-working class victimhood to the point where people of opposing viewpoints would need to have a dialogue with one another in order to sort things out, and you DO NOT want people of different viewpoints talking to each other. That sort of thing has undermined every great leader in the past. You want to do everything you can to shut down the free exchange of ideas (including dismantling the public library system, but that’s a problem for another time.) Learn from their mistakes, and use the media to so thoroughly inflate the egos of your supporters, and to so thoroughly abuse those who oppose you, that everyday conversations will be dominated by talk of how great you and your policies are (and be sure to have the media call any protesters cry-babies etc. etc.).

The wonderful thing about this is that eventually, it will create a positive feedback loop. Your supporters are empowered to become creative, your supporters produce pro-Trump art, the public, after hearing pro-Trump stuff from the media, see it in the world of art, which they think of as a place where ‘truth’ and the ‘human spirit’ are explored, and boom. You’ve got people seeing a world where Donald Trump is saving America from disaster, and calling that beautiful.

While art by itself has a peculiar ability to bring people closer together (and I’m not referring just to music, oh no. Something like the Mona Lisa reaches something in every person’s soul, and because that something is reached, we have the ability to love our fellow men and women. Literature achieves this quite nicely, too. Someone who reads Flowers for Algernon and is not moved to love their fellow men and women has problems...I trust that you haven’t read it, since, as we’ve established in a previous letter, your idea of love is very possessive and you-centric, and the kind of love that Flowers for Algernon engenders is one that is very warm and giving, and if you were to read it, you would feel impelled to give the latter kind of love to the world, because you are a mentally and emotionally stable individual.

Because we are more in touch with ourselves, we are able to better connect with other human beings. In the case of Trump art, the part of ourselves that will be reached will be the part that has been denounced as ‘inappropriate,’ that longs to return to the past, that hates the way that society is structured, and that prioritizes our needs over the needs of other people. Having that kind of energy unleashed by art is dangerous, since it threatens to spill over into chaos, but, thankfully, reminders of you and your greatness will be there to channel that energy. People will come together and praise you, talk about how you are healing the rawest, angriest parts of their souls. And, since Trump art will be reaching such a vulnerable part of themselves, they will be incredible hostile to anyone who suggests that they are being used or manipulated. They will become passionate defenders of you and your legacy, even more so than they are now, because their perspectives are being bolstered by the artistic community.

Barring a resistance movement built by true artists. art under your regime is poised to be a political weapon like no other art before it. Through the mass media, and with a little employment of your masterful manipulation tactics, you can convince your maddened legions that, despite their lack of formal training, they, too, can become artists. Once they are convinced of this, they will produce art that glorifies you and your ambitions, and, through repeated exposure to their art, a larger number of people will start to see you as America’s savior. Then, and only then, the masses will rally behind you, and will let you do as you please for this crippled country of ours.

Finally, the day has arrived! The little boy inside you is rejoicing. The museum is filled with portraits of you, and people are setting up altars in front of them, and sending up prayers to you. You stride down the marble-tiled hallway, your shoes clacking against towering Trump “T”s emblazoned on each and every tile, marveling out how these people worship you.

(You still hate them for worshipping you, though.)

A woman walks up to you and takes your hand (you fight back a grimace.)

“Thank you, Sir, for everything you have done,” she says, tears in her eyes. (you know that you have done nothing, not really, beyond create a society where no one will question your authority, but this woman, like everyone who voted you into office, is a sucker, and she believes in the myth that you have thrust upon the world.)

“My pleasure,” you say. You look at her warmly, and she releases you, and goes back to her filthy shopping cart.

(You wipe your hand on an attendant’s coat.)

Here, here is the museum of your dreams, filled with the finest art the world has ever produced—an art that has no real criticism, because in order for it to exist it must be taken at face value; an art that is produced exclusively by people who have no understanding of craft; an art that is based on deception and manipulation of the emotions of its artists; an art that exists because true artists have been intimidated and harassed into silence; an art that sees you and only you as the ultimate definition of beauty; an art that has convinced people that the only way to express themselves is to somehow refract their personalities through a lens somehow related to you; and one that unifies people around you, as you represent to them the last hope for their fragile self-esteems--and you are standing in the middle of it all, the greatest artist the world has ever known.

Sincerely,

Nicholas