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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 US’s 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.

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