Rob Israel’s Rage

Rob Israel started posting illustrations of Trump on Instagram during those early months of the presidency. Crude things, degrading, the kind of work you make when you’ve decided there’s nothing left to lose by saying it plainly. He tagged Trump in every one, which was either pure futility or pure honesty or both.

I followed his feed for a while back then, when shock was still a baseline and half the country was talking about giving him a chance. Israel wasn’t interested in that conversation. He was just drawing, week after week, each illustration uglier than the last, which tracked with how fast everything was accelerating. The work had no strategy underneath it. No hope of changing anything. Just rage rendered into color and line.

The thing about making angry art is that it can’t survive being calculated. You either feel it or you don’t. Israel clearly did. Somewhere he mentioned the cascade of appointments, Putin probably on speed dial, the sense that the country was tearing itself apart and no one was pretending it wasn’t anymore. He said it like he was tired, like he understood this was his work now—keeping himself functional by getting the disgust out onto the screen.

That’s all that kind of art actually does. It keeps you from swallowing the whole thing and disappearing into it. The work doesn’t change the president. It changes the person making it, or at least it keeps them intact long enough to get to the next day.

I don’t know if it worked for Israel. Probably doesn’t matter. But I understood why he was doing it.