Ex-Republican alarmed by Trump's new 'propaganda poster': 'Scowling visage staring down'

Former Republican-turned-independent Rick Wilson is sounding the alarm about a massive poster of President Donald Trump hanging at the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C.

Writing on his Substack, Wilson explained that "propaganda" like this is all part of a plan to urge "your obedience and subservience to a culture that is inescapable and immovable."

The giant banner hangs near a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln, who founded the department in 1862. Trump has ushered in significant cuts to the department's staff and international food programs, as the Topeka Capitol-Journal reported this week.

"Donald Trump’s scowling visage staring down at the little people scurrying to their government jobs—reminding all who pass that the Dear Leader is omnipotent and omnipresent," wrote Wilson.

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Trump wants to be turned into a "myth" or "into a superhuman figure," he added. The banner is just part of another effort by Trump to celebrate "his face, his brand, his ideas, his name and his mythology." A different one is that Washington, D.C. will be holding a parade for Trump's birthday in which military tanks and weaponry are marched through the streets of the nation's capital.

"Authoritarian regimes understand that power isn’t just enforced through secret police, guns, and laws (though those are all part of the mix)—it’s imposed through iconography, art, media, architecture, and mass spectacle," Wilson explained. "Every banner, monument, or propaganda poster is a brick in the psychological fortress of the regime, designed to project permanence, dominance, and legitimacy."

Big statues are about domination, not commemoration, he said. They're meant to make individual Americans "feel small" while the state seems more powerful and "unchallengeable."

He recalled Albert Speer’s Nazi “cathedral of light” events that promoted Hitler's vision of a "thousand-year Reich."

"Almost a century later, even after the Allies crushed the Nazis to dust, their symbols remain culturally potent: statues and posters of muscular Aryans, Hitler’s speeches holding vast arenas in hypnotic sway, the omnipresent swastika banners, and the use of radio, print—and even the world’s first cable TV system—to pound in Hitler’s message and enforce control," Wilson wrote.

He closed by reinforcing Trump's demand for "obedience and conformity," which are all part of a larger "fascism playbook." Whether it's Germany in the 1930s or the Oval Office in 2025, the goal of "clever creatives" is "to give the Dear Leader more cultural control, more power, more latitude and freedom of movement."

He warned: "It starts with banners, leads to the big torchlit rallies, and ends in camps."

See the banner below.

Read the full column here.