Wade or police brutality or Standing Rock or the Catch-22 of impeaching Trump to the enablement of President Mike Pence. For many of us, Trump's America is so horrifying that our work feels worthless if it isn't tackling head-on the swastikas appearing on playgrounds or the threat to Roe v. Granted, dick pic mosaics are no longer funny because the reality of a Trump presidency is no longer funny, but the problem extends beyond Trump-themed art. The poet May Sarton once described this feeling of inaccessibility: "It's like another country you can't reach." How apt. Shelly Oria, a writer and creativity coach in New York City, said that many of her clients are artistically blocked: "It's this feeling that art has become pointless, that we should abandon our work and use the time for activism." I, too, have many artist friends and writing students who feel depressed, enraged, dead inside, or simply locked out of whatever they were working on before Trump was elected. For the first few days after November 8, I was among those "others." I was shell-shocked-frankly, I was devastated. Though some artists feel more motivated than ever ("As soon as the shit started hitting the fan that Tuesday night, I got to writing," San Francisco-based poet Matthew Siegel told me in a Facebook message), others feel the opposite. The volume of Trump-inspired art that emerged during campaign season was simultaneously disgusting (he did not deserve our tributes, our energy) and inspiring because, hey, cool, artists were inspired.īut post-election, something shifted. As 2016 unfolded, artists gifted the world a photomosaic of Trump's face made of five hundred dick pics, a Trump portrait painted with menstrual blood (title: "Whatever"), the "Grab Them by the Pussy" remix, a controversial naked Trump statue, and endless comedy-standup, improvisational, sketch. I opened my laptop and wrote in that feverish way that feels like channeling.
![grab them by the eyes unblocked grab them by the eyes unblocked](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjk4NDMvMTI0OTMyLmdpZg==/original/hmEio4.gif)
Around that time, I woke one morning from a dream about Melania, who, like me, had woken that morning in a foreign country beside a man with a Trump fixation. He made a huge, garish, and somehow beautiful caricature painting of Trump, Pope Francis, and El Chapo sitting in a prison cell-Trump bound and gagged, the other two playing cards. Last winter, I was living in a village in central Mexico with a Mexican painter who developed an artistic fascination with Donald Trump.