This week, a massive banner featuring President Donald Trump’s portrait was draped across the Department of Labor building in Washington, D.C., alongside an American flag and Theodore Roosevelt. It carried the phrase “American Workers First.”

In announcing it at a Cabinet meeting, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-Deremer said, “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American Worker.” The visual and the Dear-Leader praise with which it was delivered echoed state propaganda around the world: loyalty expressed through scale, posture, and repetition. The message was not governance. It was deference.

We are watching a deliberate shift. Not just in policy, but in appearance. From campaign stage design to museum leadership changes, the authoritarian right is rebranding the nation, with idolizing images of President Trump at the center of it. Each episode may be minor, but they accumulate.

The Reagan administration was the first to center the “image of the day”—a deliberate visual meant to define each news cycle. Every backdrop, every camera angle, every pose served narrative control. What began as media savvy evolved into aesthetic dominance.

But now, the look is harder and weirder. Golden thrones. Muscle-bound superheroes in red ties. Jesus holding court with Trump in heaven. Devotional kitsch.

The shift is quite visible in the strange devotional art orbiting Trump. Paintings by Jon McNaughton depict him flanked by Jesus, crossing rivers, or holding the Constitution like sacred text. Bobbleheads, NFTs, gilded sneakers, superhero movie posters—kitsch that once seemed like fan-fiction now feeds directly into political identity. It is not irony. It is iconography.

While the kitsch is laughable, meanwhile the staging of so many national events now mirrors authoritarian regimes with their  vast squares, flags, martial lines of force. It echoes North Korean parades, Russian state grandeur, the Nuremberg rally.

Strongmen rely on spectacle: Uniforms. Flags. Martial might. Such leaders use these not just to show force, but to crowd out alternatives. When every rally looks like a military parade, dissent becomes dangerous. The aesthetic of power teaches its own lesson.

All this takes a strong visual brand.

In truth, at first, it seems absurd, but devotional kitsch has become a government banner. It is part of the political weather, and this is the real danger: that we adapt.

The rebrand is outward evidence of an insidious takeover of culture. Institutions that once told a broad American story are being dismantled and rebuilt. Museum boards reshuffled, library collections purged, arts funding redirected. The lens itself is being reshaped: who is featured, who is removed, what is considered “traditional.” The visual archive of America is under revision.

Authoritarian regimes rely on controlling aesthetics. Resistance can begin with aesthetics too.

In Soviet Russia, artists coded dissent into public murals and storybooks. In Chile under Pinochet, women stitched arpilleras—quilted protest scenes that carried memory and truth out of a censored country. In Belarus, protestors carried signs that read “I am just walking.”

Mockery is a tool. Ridicule is a civic act.

Culture is not a sideshow. It is the stage.

My dearest hope is that people will not stop noticing the shift, and use all means at their disposal to take back the American culture now being ripped away.