WASHINGTON, July 1 — The scene unfolding around the White House these days is one of gilded excess, and not everyone is buying what the administration is selling. On the ground, critics and analysts are describing a second Trump term that is setting records for graft while establishing what one observer calls a “tawdry, tacky aesthetic” that is not going over with the public at large.
The critique arrives even as the progressive wing of the Democratic party continues to purge its own establishment — with new progressive wins in Colorado just last night — but the one thing they got right, the argument goes, was warning everyone that this president has absolutely no class and no shame. Analyst Simplicius, in a piece titled “The Kitschification of America,” sums up the aesthetic at play.
For those unfamiliar with the term, kitsch represents a cheap, low-effort aesthetic, often a mishmash of pop-culture sediment scraped lazily together. It was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s for the sake of consumerist memorabilia in the form of little gewgaws and cheap souvenir-shop trinkets. Kitsch, in this reading, is the embodiment of a culture of excess — a culture that has reached its zenith, its peak flowering phase, and has begun to wilt, shedding its invasive spores haphazardly over the once-virgin garden.
It is the exaltation of “memeified” cultural tokens to the point of parody, a phenomenon that predates the internet meme. It purposely calls attention to itself, becoming a kind of self-mockery.
By nightfall, the conversation had moved beyond aesthetics into the gossip, the corrupt pardons, and the tally of the biggest financial scores and scams. The president, who one observer notes has a taste for starting illegal wars and displaying tacky trash, appears to be setting a tone that even some of his own supporters find difficult to defend. What comes next is unclear.
But as the progressive Democratic party continues to shift leftward, and as the corruption allegations mount, the question of whether this tawdry wave has crested — or is still building — is one that residents of the capital are asking themselves as they watch the show unfold.
