The works have been endlessly parodied<\/a> since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they\u2019ve become ubiquitously memed<\/a>. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known<\/a> as the \u201cunpopular opinion\u201d meme<\/a>.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis.<\/p>\n As Daisy puts it, \u201cNorman Rockwell was antifa\u201d\u2014literally.<\/p>\n So you\u2019ll understand her indignation when President Trump began hijacking her grandfather\u2019s legacy to promote what she considers modern-day fascism.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n Over the past several months, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been lawlessly appropriating Rockwell\u2019s Leave It to Beaver-esque paintings to promote its Gestapo tactics. In August, the DHS Instagram account posted his 1971 painting<\/a> of Americans saluting a billowing American flag, alongside the department\u2019s own caption: \u201cProtect our American way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n A month later, the government reproduced his famous 1946 painting<\/a> of workers cleaning the Statue of Liberty, taking a symbol of welcome for the tired, poor and tempest-tost and superimposing upon it directives to \u201cPROTECT YOUR HOMELAND\u201d and \u201cDEFEND YOUR CULTURE\u201d by joining Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant goons.<\/p>\n Even Rockwell\u2019s Santa<\/a> was recently enlisted by DHS.<\/p>\n \u201cThey used [the paintings] . . . as though his work aligned with their values, i.e., promoting this segregationist vision of America,\u201d said Daisy. \u201cAnd so of course we were upset by this, because Norman Rockwell was really very clearly anti-segregationist.\u201d<\/p>\n This fall, Daisy decided to take action, organizing a family letter<\/a> denouncing DHS\u2019s unauthorized use of their patriarch\u2019s oeuvre. (You can watch my conversation with Daisy in the video embedded atop this newsletter, recorded by my Bulwark colleague Hannah Yoest and edited by our video team.)<\/p>\n New members: 30 days of free Bulwark+<\/a><\/p>\n NORMAN ROCKWELL IS HARDLY the only American cultural treasure unwillingly drafted into the MAGA cause.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprising that Trump has slapped his name onto several institutions with some connection to politics or government<\/a>, such as the U.S. Institute of Peace<\/a>, now the \u201cDonald J. Trump Institute of Peace,\u201d and the syntactically awkward \u201cThe Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.\u201d (The legality of these acts of eponymizing is in dispute<\/a>.) But some of his most frequent targets are bits of Americana traditionally disconnected from politics.<\/p>\n These include the many pop hits scoring Trump rallies and social media posts against musicians\u2019 wishes. Artists as varied as Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>, Bruce Springsteen<\/a>, Olivia Rodrigo<\/a>, Semisonic<\/a>, SZA<\/a>, Village People<\/a>, and Creedence Clearwater Revival<\/a> have condemned Trump\u2019s unauthorized use of their music.<\/p>\n Some of this is about glomming on to hits to borrow their popularity. Our president would rebrand apple pie if he could. It\u2019s not only about that, though. As with the Rockwell case, many of these artistic abductions are meant to weaponize nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time\u2014back when America was still \u201cgreat,\u201d of course.<\/p>\n Classic children\u2019s books feature heavily. For instance, the immigration crackdown in Charlotte, North Carolina, was branded \u201cOperation Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/a>,\u201d appropriating the title of the 1952 novel by E.B. White. White\u2019s descendants were outraged.<\/p>\n E.B. White \u201cbelieved in the rule of law and due process,\u201d the author\u2019s granddaughter Martha White said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cHe certainly didn\u2019t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people\u2019s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons.\u201d<\/p>\n Send this newsletter to a friend irked by the Trump administration\u2019s misuse of these cultural works and symbols:<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n Both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth<\/a> and the Department of Justice<\/a> likewise arrogated another children\u2019s literary classic, the character Franklin the Turtle, to promote the administration\u2019s extralegal boat strikes and deportation efforts. Once again, the publisher\u2014which happens to be Canadian\u2014condemned the Trump administration\u2019s posts<\/a>. \u201cFranklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,\u201d the publisher said in a tweet. \u201cWe strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin\u2019s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the Rat Pack has been conscripted into the misplaced MAGA nostalgia for a bygone, more nativist era.<\/p>\n \u201cWatched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids,\u201d Stephen Miller tweeted<\/a> Friday. \u201cImagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.\u201d<\/p>\n As my<\/a> colleagues<\/a> have pointed out, this is a strange takeaway about two singers whose parents immigrated from Italy, which would have been considered \u201cthird world\u201d at the time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not exactly unheard of for an authoritarian regime to try to co-opt cherished cultural darlings from eras past. The Soviets famously exploited Tchaikovsky. The Nazis used Wagner. And both, like Trump, simultaneously cracked down on contemporaneous<\/a> artists<\/a> whom they deemed disloyal or degenerate.<\/p>\n But exploiting Rockwell in this way is additionally offensive if you know anything about his artistic trajectory.<\/p>\n Share The Bulwark<\/a><\/p>\n ON THE BASEMENT LEVEL of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge is a room of Rockwell\u2019s early works, his covers for the Saturday Morning Post. It\u2019s cover after cover of sweet, whimsical, slice-of-life scenes of middle-class Americana. There are Boy Scouts<\/a> and baseball games<\/a>. <\/a>Town gossips<\/a>, soda shops<\/a>, and returning G.I.\u2019s<\/a>. And of course all those adorable<\/a> childhood<\/a> shenanigans<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no wonder this artist appeals to an administration that pledges to turn back the clock to some prior golden age. Rockwell\u2019s scenes look like a happy, wholesome past that many Americans wish they could return to. But this bucolic past was imagined; Daisy notes that her grandfather created and staged it, using models he cast from his local communities in Vermont and Massachusetts. The artist himself grew up in a boarding house, in a cramped urban environment.<\/p>\n \u201cHe loved this idea of this, like, sort of small town idealistic thing,\u201d said Daisy, who is an artist and writer too. \u201cBut he made it up himself.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s something else that feels a little off in Rockwell\u2019s depictions of this imagined past: They are overwhelmingly white. In fact, there are scarcely any people of color at all.<\/p>\n For Trumpers, this is presumably a feature, not a bug. You\u2019ll find similarly pale complexions populating the Trump Department of Labor\u2019s current anti-immigrant campaign<\/a>, which seemed to borrow from that early Rockwell aesthetic when it used AI to generate images of blonde, buff, cleft-chinned male youths powering Trump\u2019s \u201cBlue Collar Boom.\u201d<\/p>\n In Rockwell\u2019s case, the demographics were less an artistic choice than a condition of employment. The Saturday Evening Post barred him from painting people of color in anything other than subservient roles, his granddaughter says, citing interviews he gave later in life.<\/p>\n At the museum, Daisy pointed out places where he sneaked in nonwhite characters anyway, always in ways to emphasize their common humanity. For instance, in that Statue of Liberty painting that DHS stole, the team of workmen cleaning Lady Liberty\u2019s torch is racially integrated.<\/p>\n \ud83c\udf89 30 days free for new members \ud83c\udf89<\/a><\/p>\n Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. \u201cI was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,\u201d Rockwell said<\/a> in 1962. \u201cI am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, Norman Rockwell got woke.<\/p>\n Seeking more artistic control, he left the Post for Look magazine. There, he went on to paint some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement. These have pride of place in the main gallery of the Norman Rockwell Museum.<\/p>\n There you\u2019ll find his famous painting of a black family moving into a white neighborhood, \u201cNew Kids in the Neighborhood (Negro in the Suburbs)<\/a>.\u201d Another usually on display\u2014though not on my most recent visit\u2014chillingly depicts slain civil rights workers (\u201cMurder in Mississippi<\/a>\u201d). And then there is perhaps his best-known work, the 1964 painting that features 6-year-old Ruby Bridges desegregating a white school in New Orleans. She is escorted by U.S. marshals, whose heads are just out of the frame. Also unseen is the angry mob that necessitated the presence of those marshals, and that presumably scrawled the racial slur behind her. The only face we see\u2014and the only one we identify with\u2014is that of a heroic little girl.<\/p>\n The painting was radical for its time. It is called \u201cThe Problem We All Live With<\/a>,\u201d a title that Daisy notes was deliberately present-tense then, and remains present-tense today.<\/p>\n If Rockwell\u2019s early illustrations of pink-cheeked lovebirds and rough-housing kids were meant to comfort audiences, those latter works were meant to challenge them. His tool for achieving both ends, though, was the same: compassion. His works ooze it, whatever the subject and whichever the characters, and regardless of how subsequent opportunists might try to exploit those works.<\/p>\n Compassion of that sort is a virtue obviously absent from Trump\u2019s mass deportation campaign\u2014and arguably from MAGA overall. Which makes the use of Rockwell\u2019s art an especially egregious misappropriation.<\/p>\n I wish I knew what Rockwell might have said about Trump\u2019s theft of his life\u2019s work in service of state-sponsored terror. But even more than that, I wonder what he would have painted.<\/p>\n Leave a comment<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Metaphor alert.<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Check out The Bulwark\u2019s \u201c12 Days of Griftmas<\/a>\u201d video if you haven\u2019t already done so. The lyrics all refer to real gifts bestowed upon our leader. (Citations included.) Thanks to the many colleagues I peer-pressured into singing, and to our video team\u2014especially Chris Herbert, Dante DiCicco, and Jamie Abraham\u2014for recording and working overtime to edit this.<\/p>\n \u2014 Sometimes I wonder<\/a> how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick<\/a> managed to run an investment bank.<\/p>\n \u2014 Bigots once said this<\/a> about my ancestors. Miller\u2019s, too.<\/p>\n \u2014 The FDA just approved<\/a> a pill version of Novo Nordisk\u2019s GLP-1 drug Wegovy. This seems like a pretty big deal. I maintain that in the medium term, the economic effects of AI are probably overstated while those of GLP-1\u2019s are massively understated.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 The Department of the Interior suspended leases<\/a> for five large offshore wind projects under construction off the East Coast. It cited national security concerns though, of course, Trump has long hated these projects. Either way, it\u2019s owning the libs at the expense of \u201cenergy independence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wants to license Americans to become literal pirates<\/a> to help Trump\u2019s Caribbean campaign. In ye olden days, a letter of marque allowed privateers to seize, like, a Spanish galleon and sell the gold doubloons. But what do you do with a big oil tanker? Or for that matter a boat full of cocaine? Are privateers supposed to pull up and sell their seized blow in Miami?<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump has made Mexico great again<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/cd0cdcfa-74b3-43de-aa19-972ea56def8b_3708.jpeg\")
<\/a>Rockwell\u2019s \u201cFour Freedoms\u201d paintings were used as part of a war bonds campaign during the Second World War\u2014as in this 1943 Office of War Information poster using Freedom of Speech. (Photo by Swim Ink 2 LLC \/ Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n