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According to George Orwell, there’s a simple reason authoritarian cultural campaigns can’t last: They assume that history can be “created rather than learned,” he wrote in a 1947 Atlantic essay, and this produces superficial literature, unstable and fleeting. By contrast, free societies promote “intellectual liberty” and the belief that “a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course.” Their art lasts because it has depth, and it has depth because it has truth.

Take Soviet Communist Party propaganda. As my colleague Anne Applebaum has written, throughout the 20th century, the party’s posters and films were meant to be “overwhelming and inspiring,” with strong visual styles, rousing music, and a clear message: Here is the bounty of a communist society, with its abundant harvest and strong, healthy workers. But many of those spectacles fell short, Anne observed: When people saw them, they felt a chasm between the propaganda’s veneer and their own “impoverished reality.” This is what Orwell meant when he said that writings in a totalitarian state are “bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set”—rigid, rote, and brittle.

Which is not to say that art as propaganda cannot be effective. It has long been a powerful tool, especially since the advent of mass media enabled states to disseminate messages on an unprecedented scale. In the U.S., many administrations have attempted to extend their influence through art. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, which commissioned the famous “I Want You” posters of Uncle Sam that helped persuade people to join the fight; under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the War Advertising Council (now the Ad Council) coordinated campaigns supporting the World War II effort, leveraging symbols such as Rosie the Riveter to recruit women to the workforce.

Activists, scholars, and critics have continued to track the ways the federal government has promoted certain kinds of art while sidelining others. Richard Nixon was accused of using his administration to monitor anti-war activists, including John Lennon and Jane Fonda, and he even attempted to deport Lennon in 1972; in 1990, Congress forced the National Endowment for the Arts to implement a “decency and respect” standard for awarding grants, triggered by the controversy over certain NEA-supported works (one piece in particular, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, was denounced on the Senate floor as “a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.”)

But compared with those of his predecessors, Donald Trump’s cultural campaign is perhaps the most overt and visually distinct. Memes aside—his administration’s social media has its own aesethetic—Trump’s architectural and design taste maximizes size, gilt, and jingoism, asserting the superiority of his administration above all that came before and all that will come after. The Independence Arch, whose nickname, “Arc de Trump,” the president has embraced, could be the tallest triumphal arch in the world, with gold-lettered inscriptions and gilded statues. During his second term, he tacked his name onto the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chairman, declaring his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”; he razed the East Wing in favor of a ballroom, reportedly projected to cost about $600 million; he paved over the White House’s Rose Garden so that it would look like Mar-a-Lago’s beach club, featuring the same yellow-striped umbrellas; and his administration overhauled the selection process for the Venice Biennale, requiring American submissions to “showcase American excellence.” (Trump’s name was recently removed from the Kennedy Center after a federal judge ordered it, and a legal battle continues over whether the president has the authority to build the ballroom without congressional approval.)

Then there are the attempts to censor museums. Last March, in preparation for America’s 250th birthday celebration, Trump issued an executive order compelling cultural institutions to “Restor[e] Truth and Sanity to American History,” and directed J. D. Vance to wipe “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian; several months later, Trump launched an extensive review to “remove divisive or partisan narratives” from the museums. Last July, the National Museum of American History silently cut—and later restored—a mention about Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit, and in August, the administration ordered the Smithsonian to send over documents including internal memos and plans for forthcoming shows in order to vet them (it is unclear whether the Smithsonian has fully complied). Last week, a federal appeals court allowed the administration to remove a slavery exhibit from a Philadelphia park.

Still, Trump’s influence over American art and museums has its limits. Artists have canceled shows at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, and some exhibits are sidestepping the president’s war on DEI. In January, the National Museum of African Art opened a show by LGBTQ artists from Africa and the diaspora, and this month, an augmented-reality display on the National Mall tells the stories of five women who worked alongside the men monumented there. And as my colleague Clint Smith recently reported, the leadership at the Smithsonian is holding steady—for now. Lonnie Bunch, the 73-year-old secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in March that “there is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian.” (But as Clint notes, Bunch also “appears to be inching closer” to leaving.) Meanwhile, the administration’s threats linger, mostly in the form of withholding funding from museums and artists that do not obey its vision.

Orwell argues that “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” Free expression in America has not been snuffed out, even when faced with political opposition in the past. But the Trump era is the latest test of just how much it can endure, and how it might evolve in response.