The New Yorker:

It makes sense that a man who yearns for a reality untroubled by other humans would be drawn to art that is untouched by anything human.

By Katy Waldman

On February 19th, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social to congratulate himself on vanquishing congestion pricing in his home state. “congestion pricing is dead,” he posted. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is saved. long live the king!” The message was amplified by the White House’s official X account, which tweeted it with an A.I.-generated image of Trump, golden-haired and golden-crowned, blotting out the New York City skyline.

The illustration, which was styled to look like the cover of Timemagazine, displayed the President’s fondness for crude symbols of power and wealth. He is the lord of literalism, and this literalism defines much of what he’s done to amuse himself since retaking the White House. (See, for instance, his recent appearance at a mixed-martial-arts event in Miami with Elon Musk and other functionaries. They entered the stadium to Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”) Trump has proposed a military parade with Humvees and helicopters on his birthday, and according to CNN he has been hard at work renovating the Oval Officefor his second term, swapping out the wooden consoles for marble-topped decorative tables, hanging “gilded Rococo mirrors” on the doors, ensconcing golden cherubim in the pediments, and wrapping the television remote in shiny paper. (His “gold guy” had to be flown in from Florida.) He has installed a portrait of George Washington brandishing a sword across from an oil painting of a grinning Ronald Reagan, and both former Presidents may soon be able to look out at the former Rose Garden, which Trump plans to pave over. Nearby sits a bullion-like paperweight engraved with trump, in all caps; at this rate of converting subtext into text, the President will soon use his trumppaperweight to bash in the head of a bald eagle.

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