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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the latest edition of Receipts, the last of 2025. From Charlotte’s Web to Frank Sinatra, all sorts of American cultural treasures have been unwillingly conscripted into the authoritarian cause. Among the most galling: Norman Rockwell, whose iconic paintings have been used as recruitment propaganda by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. If you know anything about Rockwell’s iconic civil rights paintings, this is infuriating.
I recently sat down with Rockwell’s granddaughter Daisy Rockwell to talk about the artist’s legacy, his deep concern for racial equality, and the misuse of his art. We met at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the Berkshires, a fabulous little museum that everyone should visit.
In the meantime, I hope you’ll consider joining Bulwark+. You’ll not only get access to all our locked content and be able to sound off in the comments, but you’ll be helping us do off-the-beaten-path journalism like this. And if you sign up today, your first thirty days are free:
–Catherine
The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell
Trump misuses the artist’s work—like other cultural icons—to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas.
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Stockbridge, Massachusetts
NOT EVERYONE WHO VENTURES OUT to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Western Massachusetts gets the luxury of a tour from the artist’s own family.
But on a fall day in this—yes—picture-perfect New England town, Daisy Rockwell graciously took me through some of her famous grandfather’s most iconic works.
You’d recognize these masterpieces anywhere, even if you don’t know them by name. The “Four Freedoms” paintings depict the fundamental freedoms that President Franklin Roosevelt once declared all people entitled to: Freedom of Speech (a lone man who resembles young Abe Lincoln rises in dissent at a town hall meeting), Freedom From Want (a happy family awaiting a roast turkey), Freedom of Worship (multiethnic group praying), and Freedom From Fear (parents tucking in their peacefully sleeping children).
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The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the “unpopular opinion” meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis.
As Daisy puts it, “Norman Rockwell was antifa”—literally.
So you’ll understand her indignation when President Trump began hijacking her grandfather’s legacy to promote what she considers modern-day fascism.
Over the past several months, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been lawlessly appropriating Rockwell’s Leave It to Beaver-esque paintings to promote its Gestapo tactics. In August, the DHS Instagram account posted his 1971 painting of Americans saluting a billowing American flag, alongside the department’s own caption: “Protect our American way of life.”
A month later, the government reproduced his famous 1946 painting of workers cleaning the Statue of Liberty, taking a symbol of welcome for the tired, poor and tempest-tost and superimposing upon it directives to “PROTECT YOUR HOMELAND” and “DEFEND YOUR CULTURE” by joining Trump’s anti-immigrant goons.
Even Rockwell’s Santa was recently enlisted by DHS.
“They used [the paintings] . . . as though his work aligned with their values, i.e., promoting this segregationist vision of America,” said Daisy. “And so of course we were upset by this, because Norman Rockwell was really very clearly anti-segregationist.”
This fall, Daisy decided to take action, organizing a family letter denouncing DHS’s unauthorized use of their patriarch’s oeuvre. (You can watch my conversation with Daisy in the video embedded atop this newsletter, recorded by my Bulwark colleague Hannah Yoest and edited by our video team.)