Blog / 2025 / How To Tell the Difference between Art and Propaganda

Both art and propaganda are designed to change your mood and maybe even your mind. The difference lies in the intent behind that change.

Art seeks to open a conversation and inspire reflection; propaganda’s goal is to discourage critical thinking.

In other words, art is often richly layered and complex. And even when it’s simple, it’s not looking to convince you to believe anything—except maybe that it’s worthwhile to slow down and spend a moment with art. Propaganda, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to insert an idea into your head and, in that way, convert you to its cause.

Of course, while this description makes it all seem pretty clear, in practice it can be complicated to make the distinction.

For example, there’s this painting from the fall of 2017. It’s packed with critiques of the beginning of Trump’s first term, and it uses Hello Kitty to call attention to the 45^th President’s strange appeal.

I chose this Japanese cartoon character mainly because her creators designed her without a mouth specifically so that it would be easier for people to project their feelings onto the cat. Though Trump obviously has a mouth, his supporters still tend to assign their emotions to him and then rhapsodize about how relatable he is.

What’s more, Hello Kitty is a super-brand in which the cat is everything, and the character’s backstory is mostly unknown. The same is true of Trump and his ability to sell his supporters both his alternative facts and an endless stream of garbage items bearing his face, his name, or his slogan. The image is full of details like the Hello Sh*tty phone case, headphones, and golf clubs as well as the syringe full of the poop of a bull.

In the upper right, Vladimir Putin’s portrait replaces George Washington’s on our dollar, since the Russian dictator’s cyber-meddling is at least in part responsible for this new America. And Jesus graces a one million dollar bill in a nod to the prosperity gospel, a perversion of Christian teachings which dictates that, if an individual has a lot of money, then god must have chosen them, and therefore they are deserving of praise.

These are just some of the references in this painting, but I think my take on Trump is clear: I’m not a fan. Still, I wouldn’t call this painting propaganda. It’s too complex to qualify for that classification, and that becomes only more obvious when I compare my Trump portrait with these two below.

Last week, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and Personnel along with the official White House social media profile posted these images. Trump himself had shared the “LONG LIVE THE KING” text on his personal account on his own platform, but, minutes later, his staff added these uncredited images showing him wearing a crown.

In both versions, the 47^th President is obviously meant to resemble a king standing in front of the NYC skyline. The image used by the White House account has the added detail of a red border, evoking a Time magazine cover, but in this case “Time” is replaced with “Trump.” Considering 47’s penchant for displaying fake covers featuring his face, this faux Time magazine feels especially pointed.

These are, without a doubt, propaganda. For one thing, they reinforce Trump’s comment that he’s a monarch who should be celebrated without question. On a deeper level, the people who are posting this stuff have a lot of power, and, because of that authority, everything that these accounts promote has an aura of incontrovertible force.

These images are meant to hypnotize you into thinking that Trump is already king of the United States.

47 has been working towards this for quite some time—ever since he first started talking about being president for life in 2018, after Xi Jinping succeeded in getting the Chinese government to hand him that power. Over the years, Trump has brought up this idea repeatedly, usually referring to it as a third term and once last year by assuring voters that if they turned out in November they’d never need to vote again.

A lot of people find it easy to dismiss Trump’s comments or even the posts by official government accounts as typical of 47’s clownish kind of showmanship, but many of us see this for the serious threat it is.

Yesterday, just a week after the Trump-as-king posts appeared, 47 shared an AI-generated video depicting “Trump Gaza,” a beachside resort town that takes Trump-branded garbage products to a whole new level. The images above are stills from that video.