Trump wants to be a cultural tastemaker. The CIA did it first.

The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics runs downstream of culture.” That seems to be part of why President Donald Trump has spent so much time in his second term trying to take control of American arts: because that’s the water that streams down into politics. If American politics is ever going to be purely Trumpian, American culture had better become so first.

Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to conduct a review that will leave it better aligned with his own understanding of arts and history. (He wants less focus, he’s said, on “how bad slavery was.”) He has installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center and called for an end to drag shows and so-called “woke” history. He cut federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sending ripple effects through the nation’s arts infrastructure. Some of the funding left in the NEA, Trump has earmarked for his own pet projects: a sculpture garden depicting Trump-approved national heroes (no abstract sculptors need apply); patriotic plays and concerts that are themed to America’s 250th anniversary.

As Trump grabs for influence over the American arts, he’s been straightforward in what he thinks it should look like. He likes big, bombastic, spectacle-driven work that is also fully representational, uncluttered by metaphors or symbolism. He wants nothing that might suggest that America has ever been less than great, except for when it was under Democratic leadership. He wants nostalgic Norman Rockwell-style Americana, not Kehinde Wiley. He doesn’t want Hamilton; he wants 1776, and not the all-female 1776 revival from a couple of years ago, either.

Trump isn’t being all that innovative here. The US government has meddled in American arts before. Most famously, the CIA spent decades during the Cold War funding some artists and literary magazines while surveilling and harassing others, the better to shape America’s image on the world stage. The CIA thought that politics were downstream of culture, too — especially when you and your enemy both have nuclear bombs and would like to avoid using them.

“In our eagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy of open war, ‘peaceful’ techniques will become more vital in times of pre-war softening up, actual overt war, and in times of post-war manipulation,” runs a CIA memo from 1945, anticipating the shift in tactics that the new atom bomb would necessitate. It was clear even this early on, writes historian Frances Stonor Saunders in her authoritative book The Cultural Cold War, that the “operational weapon” the US would use to fight the war with the Soviets “was to be culture.”

Putting the CIA’s cultural cold warfare next to Trump’s arts power grab is a surprisingly revelatory exercise. Previously, when institutions of the US government got mixed up in the arts world, it was usually because they believed it to be of existential importance how America is depicted in the art that it exported to the rest of the world. Going from the CIA to Trump to back again, we can see how America ran a propaganda war in the 1960s, and how it’s trying to do so again today, in 2025.

The CIA’s cultural Cold War was carefully discreet. Many of the artists they helped fund and promote had no idea the CIA was distributing their work; some suspected, and avoided looking the gift horse too closely in the mouth.

The primary vehicle through which the CIA did its work was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international anti-communist organization dedicated to winning the war of ideas against the Soviets. Ostensibly, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was an independent organization, but more than one contemporary noticed that it had surprisingly deep pockets for an arts foundation headquartered in impoverished postwar Europe. The artists and intellectuals it funded could expect to be flown first class to beautiful locations, feted in luxury hotels, and connected with broad and prestigious platforms.

The money was all from the CIA, and it came with strings attached.

The journalist and Army combat historian Melvin Lasky outlined the strategy in a 1947 internal military memo that would come to be known as the “Melvin Lasky Proposal.” Lasky condemned the United States’ postwar failure to win over “the educated and cultured classes” of Europe to the American cause, since it was they who, “in the long run, provide moral and political leadership in the community.” Soviet propaganda, Lasky wrote, had tarred America’s image abroad: “Viz., the alleged economic selfishness of the USA (Uncle Sam as Shylock); its alleged deep political reaction (a ‘mercenary capitalistic press,’ etc.); its alleged cultural waywardness (the ‘jazz and swing mania,’ radio advertisements, Hollywood ‘inanities,’ ‘cheese-cake and leg-art’); its alleged moral hypocrisy (the Negro question, sharecroppers, Okies); etc. etc.”

Against such a campaign, Lasky wrote, it was useless to take the high road and simply let the facts speak for themselves. America needed advocates of its own to counter the Soviet story.

Lasky saw a potential solution to this problem in the establishment of a literary journal. It would be, he wrote, “a demonstration that behind the official representatives of American democracy lies a great and progressive culture, with a richness of achievements in the arts, in literature, in philosophy, in all the aspects of culture which unite the free traditions of Europe and America.” The idea was that America had to prove to Europe that it was more than just a collection of morally depraved hicks with a segregation problem. Only then would it be able to save Europe from the Soviet threat.

After the CIA adopted Lasky’s proposal, his original idea of one journal became 20, all funded secretly by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress at its peak also funded prestigious international conferences, art exhibitions, and public performances. All of them were evaluated by the CIA to confirm that they fit the brief as outlined by Lasky: they showed that the US had a tradition of highbrow culture that would appeal to the aesthetes of Paris and Berlin, and they did not condemn America for its “moral hypocrisy” — for class divides or entrenched systemic racism or anything else. For the CIA, the official and clearly stated goal of these magazines was to present European intellectuals with a vision of American-style capitalism that would seduce them away from a lingering interest in Communism.

A lot of this art and culture was genuinely very good and very important. Via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA became a champion of Abstract Expressionist art as the antithesis of Soviet-style social realism. It supported the Museum of Modern Art (which destroyed an in-progress Diego Rivera mural when Rivera painted in Lenin and declined to paint him out), and the Paris Review, originally established by a CIA agent as part of his cover. (For a full account of the Paris Review’s relationship with the CIA, see Joel Whitney’s deeply researched Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers). It turned the Boston Symphony Orchestra into an internationally celebrated institution.

Art that did engage with America’s race problem, however, or with its flourishing practice of interfering in the democratically elected governments of other countries, was considered highly suspect, and potentially a tool of the Soviets. It received no prestigious CIA funding. Sometimes, it was suppressed entirely.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA’s policy of suppressing any art about America’s race problem hit Black writers especially hard. James Baldwin and Richard Wright both wrote extensively about the sins of the Soviet Union early in their careers, and at the time, the CIA backed them accordingly. Their essays were republished in the Paris Review and in the CIA-funded magazine Encounters, and their novels were distributed internationally using government funds. Yet when they turned their attention from the Soviets to the problem of American racism and the American surveillance state, they lost the CIA’s good wishes. The stable of magazines secretly controlled by the CIA began to decline to publish their writing. The FBI and likely the CIA as well began to infiltrate their lives and assemble files on them. (Wright described the turn as “the CIA’s vacillating between secretly sponsoring and spying.”) W.E.B. Du Bois, meanwhile, who had no anti-Communist credentials, got it worst of all: the State Department simply denied him a passport.

The CIA was also active in Hollywood, where it examined films carefully for any hint of a plotline that could become anti-American propaganda. One CIA report from 1953 describes how the agent has persuaded Paramount to add “well dressed negroes” as extras to films, including one set in a tony golf club, in order to avoid fanning up a conversation about American racism. The agent admits that he couldn’t quite figure out how to pull the move off for a film set in the antebellum South. “However,” he added, “this is being off-set to a certain degree, by planting a dignified negro butler in one of the principal’s homes, and by giving him dialogue indicating he is a freed man and can work where he likes.”

Not every film could be fixed so easily. One script was found to be beyond the pale for its “implication [that the] wealth of Anglo-Texans [was] built by exploiting Mexican labor.” “I’ll see to it that it is killed each time someone tries to reactivate it at Paramount,” the agent promised. (It made its way to Warner Brothers instead, where it became Giant, James Dean’s last movie.) The now-iconic Western High Noon, too, was condemned for “its unsympathetic portrayal of American townsfolk and its featuring a Mexican prostitute character.” The movie was already out in the world by the time of the CIA agent’s report, but he promised to sabotage its chances at the Oscars anyway. (It still walked away with four trophies, if not Best Picture.)

The artistic world that the CIA built was one of American innocence. It was a world in which Black Americans had free access to wealth and prestige, people of color were never exploited, and the races existed together in a state of beneficent harmony. Aesthetics existed in a pure sphere of their own, one where brushstrokes and colors were celebrated as depoliticized expressions of freedom. Art that was explicitly political was lesser, a form of glorified propaganda. The legacy of Western art was the world’s greatest cultural achievement, and America was now the guardian of that legacy.

In many ways, that’s the artistic world that Donald Trump seems to be trying to build now all over again. Only this time, there’s no reason to pitch the art to the tastemakers of Europe.

Trump’s taste in art tends toward the populist and the kitschy. Aesthetically, the work that he’s promoting as president has less in common with the highbrow work championed in secret by the CIA, and more to do with the favorite art of Joseph McCarthy, the other great Cold War censor of American culture and a Trumpian figure if ever there was one.

McCarthy, writes Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, “was an autarchist—he wanted ‘Made in America.’ … McCarthyism was a movement—or a moment—fired with populist resentment against the establishment. In turn, McCarthy’s vulgar demagoguery was received as an insult by the ruling elite. He represented what A.L. Rowse in England scorned as ‘the Idiot People’; he offended Brahmin taste, which recoiled at mediocrity, hick mentality, the dreaded midcult.”

So averse to the highbrow was McCarthy that some CIA agents have claimed they had to promote figures like Pollock in secret, covertly, just to avoid McCarthy’s outcries. “Imagine the ridiculous howlings that would’ve gone up,” one tells Saunders in The Cultural Cold War: “‘They’re all Communists! They’re homosexuals!’ or whatever.”

Trump, too, has no use for the kind of heady intellectualism the CIA pushed during the Cold War. The art he is pushing tends to be heavily representational, and in fact is required to be so. The grant application for his planned National Garden of American Heroes explicitly forbids “abstract or modernist” statues — a problem, as Politico reported in May, because the United States does not currently have a strong tradition of representational sculptures.

Representational art was considered Soviet during the Cold War, so the CIA didn’t support it. Lacking lucrative prizes, prestigious coverage from literary magazines, or appearances in international exhibitions, representational art began to wither away. In artistic circles, it came to be considered unfashionable and unintellectual, like Victorian architecture or mall portraits. We’re still living in the world that choice built: The biggest pool of talent for representational sculpting is now in China.

It’s this kind of lopsided artistic ecosystem that can occur when the government meddles in the artistic world, even decades after the fact. “The government seemed to be running an underground gravy train whose first-class compartments were not always occupied by first-class passengers,” wrote publisher and critic Jason Epstein in 1967, as news of the CIA’s meddling in the cultural world began to make its way into the public. “The CIA and the Ford Foundation, among other agencies, had set up and were financing an apparatus of intellectuals selected for their correct cold-war positions, as an alternative to what one might call a free intellectual market where ideology was presumed to count for less than individual talent and achievement, and where doubts about established orthodoxies were taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.”

The artists and thinkers whose works were presented to the public as most urgent and necessary, important as they might have been, were not necessarily the most urgent and necessary artists and thinkers working at the time. They were the ones who fit the CIA’s stated priorities best.

Now we’re left in the world they made — one where, whatever your thoughts may be on the value of representational art, the fact is that we don’t have much of it, due in part to an artificially-produced devaluation.

That is one of the more innocent side effects of the kind of state interference with the art world that the CIA performed so covertly and that Trump is doing now with such pointed candor. More troubling is the thing they all seem to agree on, the CIA, Trump, and McCarthy too, the point where they all overlap: the belief that any work of art that engages with America’s sins must be suppressed, and any work of art that papers them over must be lifted up and celebrated. When the government starts interfering with art, it always seems to coalesce around the idea that the government itself is beyond artistic reproach.