“What do you see when you look at pictures of President Trump’s cabinet?” asks writer David French in an interactive web exclusive that ran in the New York Times’s opinion section in late April 2025. The feature’s title—“No Ordinary Cabinet. No Ordinary Time”—implied a critical lens, but Times photographer Damon Winter’s black-and-white pictures of the twenty-two new cabinet officials were largely flattering—mostly headshots and three-quarter portraits captured in front of a white backdrop, though Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posed mid-strut, a limp American flag sticking up behind him. “Trump’s critics,” writes French, a conservative political commentator, “look at the lineup and see, in essence, a group of people that bears far more resemblance to a collection of North Korean generals than it does to a traditional American cabinet.”
This bizarre disconnect—between French’s characterization and Winter’s portrayal of cabinet members as mostly dignified, friendly, confident, serious, even hip—is symptomatic of a larger crisis of representation. What happened to social satire, the age-old visual language of razor-sharp political critique? If it is not gone, it is endangered. We were reminded of its enduring power, and its systemic deplatforming, last January, when Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the Washington Post after her editor rejected her sketch satirizing tech leaders (including the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos), bowing down to the then-incoming president.
Forty years ago, at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term in office, the artist Arthur Tress created satirical representations of presidential cabinet members that were far more trenchant than the clumsy Times project. Tress’s series, Presidential Cabinet (1985–86), arrived amid another heightened period of neoconservatism in the United States. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan famously declared in his inaugural address in 1981. Armed with a cabinet of like-minded officials, he made good on his promises to chip away at the welfare state and privatize almost everything, from education to health care. It makes sense to revisit Tress’s project now, during a second Trump presidency in which many cabinet members were selected for their potential to destruct their respective offices, in which the unelected, reckless world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was given power to gut governmental agencies. Tress offers a way to think about what art and satire can and should do in times like these. “The Trump administration,” Tress, now eighty-four, recently told me, is “like Reagan’s on steroids, but going much further than Reagan’s would have ever dared.”
Arthur Tress, The Secretary of the Treasury, 1985-86. Courtesy of the artist.
By 1985, Tress, a concerned forty-something artist living in New York City, was widely known for his work from the 1960s and 1970s: disturbing staged black-and-white photographs of children amid nightmares, surreal depictions of family life, and daring scenes of queer fantasy. Yet, as he observed the malevolent impacts of Reaganism, including military buildup, conservative Supreme Court Justice appointments, the dismantling of Medicare, and a lack of attention to the early AIDS crisis, Tress felt compelled to turn his surrealist eye onto very real governmental leaders. A longtime enthusiast of the experimentation and biting rhetoric of political cartoons, he had even amassed a small collection of works by some of the greats, including Francisco Goya and Thomas Nast, as well as old issues of Punch magazine. It was his hope to “create some kind of expressive, graphic, social commentary on what was happening,” he recalled in our interview.
By the early 1980s, Tress was increasingly using color film and foregoing human subjects in favor of working with props he arranged on a tabletop in his modest apartment-cum-studio on Riverside Drive. He made his series Teapot Opera (1980), conceived as a three-part creation myth, from miniatures arranged on the table. Staged photographic work that involved toys, dolls, and little objects was at the time a small trend in an art world abuzz with critiques of mass culture, and this direction of his work paralleled contemporaneous practices of Ken Botto, David Leventhal, and Laurie Simmons, among others. In 1984, Tress also embarked on the series Hospital, a several-year project in which he snuck into an abandoned hospital on Roosevelt Island, a makeshift warehouse for junk medical equipment from across the decades, and created complexly painted, terrifying installations from the antiquated detritus and other props, then photographed them in black and white and color. To draw connections between public health crises past and present, he invited notable AIDS activists Darrell Yates Rist and Rodger McFarlane to pose amid the repurposed ruins. Hospital was one of the earliest artistic responses to the AIDS pandemic.
Arthur Tress, Secretary of State, 1985-86. Courtesy of the artist.
Initial inspiration for Presidential Cabinet—a project he undertook from October 1985 to February 1986—came from Spectacular Helmets of Japan, 16th–19th Century, an exhibition he saw at the Japan House Gallery in New York City. Tress imagined using similarly elaborate and flamboyant headpieces to portray the secretaries. Soon he landed on the idea of placing his own fantastical hats on skulls, thus activating deeper art-historical references: the medieval allegorical genre of the “dance of death,” the vanitas still lives from the Dutch Republic, and José Guadalupe Posada’s late nineteenth-century Day of the Dead prints, a highly political body of work Tress had collected while living in Mexico two decades earlier. Well into the 1980s, human bones were easy to come by, at least in New York City, since medical-education companies imported tens of thousands from India each year, working with networks of grave robbers and preying on vulnerable families. Calcutta reportedly exported about sixty thousand skulls and skeletons in 1984. Tress purchased four such skulls at fifty dollars apiece in the medical-education section of the flagship Barnes and Nobles in the Flatiron District. At the time, he did not fixate on the ethical quandaries, though knowing that rampant global exploitation enabled the project now lends another alarming layer to his images.
Over the course of a few months, Tress used these leering skulls, sometimes painted and repainted, to create and then photograph about a dozen miniature installations containing a ghastly assortment of objects and images sourced from flea markets, junk shops, and derelict buildings, and illuminated by electric lights covered in colored cellophane. Each picture offers an allegory of a presidential secretary, though the first one represented the president himself, like Mr. Monopoly in a top hat, chomping on a cigar. The Secretary of the Treasury shows a golden skull—ear canals covered up with moneybags and eye sockets enclosing coins—gobbling up a worker as other individuals, depicted with found German railroad toys and illustrations cut from Russian Cold War propaganda, scurry about in the background. The Secretary of Education, meanwhile, features a green skull atop a Japanese “Answer Game” robot patrolling three children, trapped inside computer monitors. This was a reference to the overemphasis on standardized testing and the counterintuitive financial penalization of schools that did not meet federal requirements. Another work, The Secretary of the Interior, shows a skull with a beaded gas mask, glass eyes normally used for taxidermized animals, colorful feathers evocative of a clown’s wig, and the Old Crow bourbon mascot as a hat; the skull perches on an oil rig in a landscape that has a tepee. With this picture, Tress specifically sought to target James G. Watt, the aggressive, racist appointee from Reagan’s first term who promoted oil and gas drilling on federal lands, neglected the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and openly criticized tribal reservations as the “failure of socialism.”
Arthur Tress, The Secretary of Education, 1985-86. Courtesy of the artist.
Each photo took a couple of weeks to create from start to finish, and Tress knew it was time to move on to the next one when, he said, “the image sort of became alive, [and] it became a little startling.” Together, the skulls portray the corruption of a cabinet brazenly unconcerned with the needs of the people its members were supposed to be serving, and the satirical series advances an incisive yet crass social commentary about misconduct and inequality.
Four decades later, our chaotic age of media saturation has turned us into jaded content consumers, even as the Trump administration’s actions become more and more abominable. Because establishment media itself has grown tamer, and satire is being curtailed (not a surprising outcome given that billionaires helm major newspapers and social-media platforms alike), Tress’s garish photos remain all the more unsettling. But they also paradoxically feel quaint, relics of a potentially less complicated era, and they encourage us to speculate on the artistic production to come. For cultural practitioners confronting political corruption today, Tress’s concoction of a new aesthetic program to combat Reaganism might serve as a model of risk-taking. Tress himself is revamping his series, busy at work on a new photo for the Department of Government Efficiency.
