Featured contributor Kevin Howley on Donald Trump sticker(s)

KEVIN HOWLEY (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. He is the author of several books including, most recently, Drones: Media Discourse & The Public Imagination. His research has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, Television & New Media, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism and Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture. In addition to his record of peer-reviewed scholarship, Howley has worked as a community newspaper columnist, radio broadcaster, and video producer. In recent years, his flash fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Quibble, Fauxmoir, and The Ryder Magazine. He is currently working on a collection of previously published stories and new short fiction titled Men Without Dogs.

[Editor’s Note: Kevin was one of the first people to contact me offering to contribute to the Paper Bullets exhibition and book. See also his essay “Watergate: The Proof Increases Everyday” on stickers about Richard M. Nixon and “No Intel Inside” on stickers about George W. Bush.]

Trumping Hope

This essay considers two instances of political art in the era of Donald J. Trump. Specifically, I discuss a pair of illustrations that draw upon and repurpose a reservoir of cultural and political meanings associated with the graphic art of Shepard Fairey, whose iconic image of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, embodied the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of so many American people. Owing as much to the long tradition of street art as to the emergence of internet memes in contemporary political discourse, the two graphics exemplify the memetic character of cultural resistance (Duncombe, 2002).

I begin with a discussion of the acclaimed “Hope” poster that captivated voters, and not a few critics, during Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign. Following this I consider two derivatives (Shifman, 2013) of this influential image – “Nope” and “Rigged” respectively – designed to belittle Trump and subvert his 2016 presidential ambitions. Throughout, I highlight the generative dimensions of Fairey’s original poster and the cultural politics informing the anti-Trump sentiment of these visual riffs.

Hope

Street artist and activist Shepard Fairey drew inspiration for his signature image from a variety of sources: Mannie Garcia’s 2006 Associated Press photograph of Obama, Sol Sender’s Obama 2008 campaign logo, the graphic arts tradition of socialist realism, and the aspirational rhetoric of the candidate himself (Art Institute of Chicago, n.d.). Although unacknowledged in US news media coverage, “Hope” also draws on portraits of Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara produced by the likes of Alberto Korda, Alfredo Rostgaard, and Ellan Serrano (Craven, 2009).

Fairey’s high-contrast stencil technique distills the unifying aspirations of Obama’s 2008 campaign. The portrait of a thoughtful Obama, his gaze looking beyond the viewer, is rendered in red and blue tones – an unmistakable visual reference to America’s “red state, blue state,” divide – and underscored by a single word: HOPE. Writing in The New Yorker, art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes the poster as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’” (2009). The Obama campaign subsequently adopted the “Hope” poster as its official logo. Before long Fairey’s illustration became a wellspring for all manner of social, political, and commercial imagery (Seiffert-Brockmann, Diehl & Dobusch, 2018).

Describing Fairey’s “pervasive aesthetic,” British comedian and political provocateur Russell Brand writes, “He made us look at Obama and America differently; he articulated simply an unexpressed feeling; he provided through art a visual anthem for a disenfranchised nation” (2015, p. 22). Eight years after the “Hope” poster galvanized Obama’s campaign, anonymous artists redeployed this visual anthem—not to mobilize support for the 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, but to rally opposition against the celebrity real estate developer cum presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

Nope

During the 2012 campaign, a “Hope” derivative featuring Obama’s rival, US Senator Mitt Romney, emerged. Rendered in the familiar red and blue color scheme, the word NOPE underscores Romney’s portrait. It is one of dozens of “Hope” derivates that captured the political sentiments of both Democrats and Republicans (Seiffert-Brockmann, Diehl & Dobusch).

The trope reemerged in 2016, soon after Donald Trump, then a reality TV star and political outsider, plowed through a crowded field of establishment Republicans to win his party’s nomination. This uncredited illustration mocks Trump’s vanity; his comb over blown by a sudden gust of wind; his gaze cast downward, unwilling to meet the viewer’s eye. It’s a striking contrast to the handsome, confident, forward looking Obama in the original “Hope” poster.

In the context of Trump’s rise to political dominance, the “Nope” image reminds us that Trump’s ascent was fueled by incessant demands that Obama produce a birth certificate proving his citizenship (ABC News, 2016). When Obama obliged, Trump questioned the legitimacy of those documents. Trump’s championing of “birtherism” certified his racist, xenophobic credentials with the Republican base who propelled him to the White House.

Rigged

Lacking the visual economy of the previous illustrations, “Rigged” nevertheless does important cultural work that is perhaps more urgent today than it was in 2016. The phrase “Trump 2016” has the look of a traditional campaign poster, and his portrait is rendered in red and blue; unlike “Nope,” however, this portrait captures Trump’s trademark anger, resentment, and disdain.

Critically, the allusion to “rigged elections” is neither hyperbolic nor prescient. Since entering politics, Trump has approached election results in one of two ways: If he wins, he boasts and gloats; if he loses, he protests the results with unsubstantiated claims of stolen elections. Hedging his bets ahead of his victory in 2016, Trump railed against “rigged” elections in a transparent effort to deflect blame and make excuses if he lost (BBC, 2016).

Put differently, Trump’s brazen attempts to subvert election integrity have a long history. Writing on the eve of the 2016 election, CNN’s Stephen Collinson (2016) posted a story headlined: “Why Trump’s Talk of a Rigged Vote is So Dangerous.” In the years since, that danger culminated in the 2021 Capitol insurrection and portends even more political mayhem during an unprecedented 2024 campaign.

References

ABC News. (2016, September 16). How Donald Trump perpetuated the ‘birther’ movement for years. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-perpetuated-birther-movement-years/story?id=42138176

Art Institute of Chicago. (n.d.). Barack Obama “Hope” poster. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/229396/barack-obama-hope-poster

BBC. (2016, October 17). US election 2016: Trump says election “rigged at polling places.” https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37673797

Brand, R. (2015). Art in the streets. In S. Fairey, Covert to overt: The under/overground art of Shepard Fairey (pp. 21-23). Rizzoli.

Collinson, S. (2016, October 19). Why Trump’s talk of a rigged vote is so dangerous. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/18/politics/donald-trump-rigged-election/index.html

Craven, D. (2009). Present indicative politics and future perfect positions: Barack Obama and Third Text. Third Text, 23(5), 643-648.

Duncombe, S. (Ed.). (2002). The cultural resistance reader. Verso.

Schjeldahl, P. (2009, February 15). Hope and glory. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/hope-and-glory

Seiffert-Brockmann, J., Diehl, T., & Dobusch, L. (2018). Memes as games: The evolution of a digital discourse. New Media & Society, 20(8), 2862-2879. Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in the digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18, 322-377.

Lacking the visual economy of the previous illustrations,
“Rigged” nevertheless does important cultural work that is perhaps more urgent
today than it was in 2016. The phrase “Trump 2016” has the look of a
traditional campaign poster, and his portrait is rendered in red and blue;
unlike “Nope,” however, this portrait captures Trump’s trademark anger,
resentment, and disdain. Critically, the allusion to “rigged elections” is neither
hyperbolic nor prescient. Since entering politics, Trump has approached
election results in one of two ways: If he wins, he boasts and gloats; if he
loses, he protests the results with unsubstantiated claims of stolen elections.
Hedging his bets ahead of his victory in 2016, Trump railed against “rigged”
elections in a transparent effort to deflect blame and make excuses if he lost
(BBC, 2016).  Put differently, Trump’s brazen attempts to subvert election
integrity have a long history. Writing on the eve of the 2016 election, CNN’s
Stephen Collinson (2016) posted a story headlined: “Why Trump’s Talk of a
Rigged Vote is So Dangerous.” In the years since, that danger culminated in the
2021 Capitol insurrection and portends even more political mayhem during an
unprecedented 2024 campaign.