Blog / 2021 / Roundup of Political Art Made during Trump’s Reign

Inspired by Amy Davis Roth’s very pleasing post, I’m doing a roundup of all the political art I’ve made since 45’s particular brand of hatefulness and greed hijacked the United States. I’m including only the images that have an almost meme-like quality in the directness of the message, leaving out the stuff like Empathetic Magic and Baby Sees ABCs which are more nuanced. As with all my work, please use these images as you like!

This drawing only happened because I wanted to make this video for Americans like me who were about to attend their first Thanksgiving celebration after Trump’s election and who were dreading dealing with the more MAGAlicious members of their gene pool.

Created in the hours after 45 famously said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017, this is the first portrait I painted of Trump and my second piece of angry art as a professional artist—with this being my first.

After some Trumpers adopted the Tiki Torch piece as a beautiful representation of their daddy-god, I painted this portrait with a very specific anti-audience in mind. Of course, in 2019, this piece surprised me by finding a different anti-audience who censored the painting and ended up really messing with my artistic confidence.

And because in making the Trump portraits I’d broken my fourteen year streak of only painting people I’d actually met, I decided to portray one of my heroes as well! Anita Hill’s #MeToo advocacy before hashtags were even a thing was an early feminist awakening for me.

I painted this patch for my winter jacket. It conveys exactly who I am to the homophobes in the super-Trumpy region of Jersey where I live.

I couldn’t go to the March for Our Lives in DC in 2018, so this was my remote contribution to the cause.

At this point, I realized that, if I was going to be making less-than-positive political artwork, I wanted to address global warming.

As is this artwork from 2019. Though this figure in a hazmat suit sure looks like the perfect pandemic painting, it predates COVID and is inspired by my solastalgia.

This piece can’t help but disappoint, because it’s 45 along with just 113 of the criminals who support him. There are so many more I wish could have included, some of whom didn’t come out as pro-Trump until after I started working on the image.

As soon as my print-on-demand shop introduced art masks, I began creating with these items in mind, starting with this rainbow American flag for one of my favorite people.

These wordy artworks were designed for those who want their masks to speak for themselves. For Your Safety is my top-selling face-covering, and Because Pandemic is pretty popular too. *

All that said, my biggest pro-mask statement isn’t actually something that goes on a mask: it’s Lifesavers Fan Art, a whole collection of mask-positive pieces, some of which aren’t even made by me.

This self-portrait is the last piece that I completed in 2020, mostly because I wanted to be able to wear a mask with this surreal image on it, but the political nature of it is clear.

As I learned when I shared Lifesavers Fan Art with my French-speaking audience, the resentment towards mask-wearing as well as the politicization of it is a global problem. It’s to the point where some French friends—socialists who despise 45 and everything he stands for—actually told me that they think Trump is “très intelligent” when it comes to masks. My eyes cannot roll hard enough.

The originals of many of these political pieces are still available. Check out all currently available artworks or skip right to the political stuff.