Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, has attracted considerable media attention during his career as a celebrity personality, businessman, and politician. He has been portrayed and appeared in popular culture since the 1980s, including several cameo appearances and lookalikes in film and television. He has also been a popular target for parody including in cartoons and via impressions.
Art In 1989, Ralph Wolfe Cowan painted a portrait of Trump called The Visionary, which hangs in Trump's Palm Beach residence of Mar-a-Lago.
Several Madame Tussauds museums have included a life-size wax statue of Trump.
Trump is alluded to with Maurizio Cattelan's 2016 sculpture America, a fully functioning toilet made of solid gold.
During the 2016 election, various artworks were made to satirize Donald Trump. These include Make Everything Great Again, a street art mural by Dominykas Čečkauskas and Mindaugas Bonanu depicting Trump French kissing Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and The Emperor Has No Balls, a series of sculptures depicting a nude Trump by the anarchist collective Indecline.
Cuban artist Edel Rodriguez painted a series of anti-Trump artworks for various magazines including Time and Der Spiegel. Illma Gore also created a piece titled Make America Great Again, which depicted Trump naked. The artwork was censored on social media sites, delisted from eBay and refused by galleries in the United States due to security concerns. It attracted bids of over £100,000 after going on display at Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London, although the artist was anonymously threatened with legal action.
Trump has been portrayed positively in numerous paintings by far-right artist Jon McNaughton. Alissa Wilkinson in Vox described McNaughton as the "single most famous pro-Trump artist".
A life-size stainless-steel sculpture of Trump, We the People or Trump and His Magic Wand, was shown at a Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021. Comedian Stephen Colbert commented "Nothing says 'the party of Christian values' like worshiping a golden idol". Since 2021, furniture maker and artist Hong Jinshi sells Trump Buddha'''s.
On October 28, 2024, an artwork entitled The Donald J. Trump Enduring Flame was installed in Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., United States. The approximately 8-foot-tall artwork was a bronze-colored stone column supporting a hand holding a tiki torch referencing the Unite the Right rally. The sculpture was slated to remain until 5pm on October 31, 2024, but was destroyed on October 30.
The Trump Defiance Monument, a bronze statue, was installed at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida in 2025. It was made by Lundeen Sculptures and inspired by pictures taken just after the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania in 2024.
In 2025, the satirical sculptures Dictator Approved and The Bitcoin President were temporarily installed in the National Mall. A satirical sculpture of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein called Best Friends Forever was briefly installed in the National Mall. It was promptly removed by the U.S. Park Police.
Comics Since 1986, he has been depicted in the Doonesbury comic strip by Garry Trudeau, prompting an unfavorable response from Trump. In 2016, the Trump-strips were released as a paperback, Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump. Trump was also depicted in Berkeley Breathed's long-running political cartoon strip Bloom County since 1989 where his brain was placed inside the body of Bill the Cat after being hit by an anchor on his yacht, the Trump Princess. In 1990, a Dilbert comic strip indirectly referred to Trump as 'God of Capitalism'.
In the 1986 comic The Man of Steel, the villain Lex Luthor is reimagined as an evil corporate executive, based in part on Trump. In 1989, a one-issue Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography was published with a cover mirroring Trump's book Trump: The Art of the Deal.
In 1989, Robert Crumb wrote "Point the Finger", a six-page comic story about Trump for Hup by Last Gasp.
In 1990, Heavy Metal published the story "The Wall" by Peter Kuper, set in a dystopic future where Donald Trump and Harry Helmsley builds a wall in New York to protect the good and well-off citizens from poor people.
In the comic-book story "Gazillionaire's Luck" originally published in 2015 and written by Michael T. Gilbert, Scrooge McDuck encounters a businessman who is a parody of Trump ("Ronald Plump") who wants Scrooge to tell him how he got to become so rich. Scrooge tells him that he got rich through thriftiness, patience and hard work, but it doesn't seem like he believes him. He steals Scrooge's Number One Dime thinking it will make him lucky, but instead he ends up ruining his own business.
During the 2016 election, various comic artists satirized Trump and his campaign. For example, following Pepe the Frog's association to the Trump campaign and the alt-right, Matt Furie published a satirical take of his appropriation on The Nib. The villain MODAAK, who appears in Spider-Gwen Annual by Marvel Comics, was based on Trump.
He is parodied in the Spanish Mort & Phil albums , and , 2016–2017.
In addition to sporadic appearances throughout its main line, Mad magazine has made Trump the main subject of two special issues, Mad About Trump (2017) and Mad About the Trump Era (2019).
In July 2017, Antarctic Press released a satirical comic book titled Trump vs. Time Lincoln in which a time travelling version of Abraham Lincoln would face off against "Final Trump", who was inspired by Immortan Joe.
Trump appears in the 2020 Bomb Queen satirical graphic novel Ultimate Bomb: Trump Card as its main antagonist.
Trump appears in a 2020 story of the Japanese manga Death Note: The a-Kira Story. Here, he encounters Ryuk, a god of death, in the Oval Office.
In 2025, for a 50th-anniversary variant cover of the Canadian comic Captain Canuck, co-creator Richard Comely depicted the superhero holding Trump by the arm and pointing the middle finger at him. Comely stated the image reflected a Canadian response to Trump’s comments on tariffs and the idea of Canada becoming a U.S. state. Trump had previously appeared in the series.
Films
Trump makes a cameo appearance as the Plaza Hotel owner in the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He also appeared as a guest in many films and series such as: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Job, Suddenly Susan, Sex and the City, The Drew Carey Show, Two Weeks Notice, Spin City, The Nanny, The Associate, The Little Rascals, Zoolander, and Eddie.Trump: What's the Deal?, was screened twice in New York in July 1991, but was not publicly released until it became available on the Internet in 2015. In 2005, ABC aired Trump Unauthorized, a biographical television film starring Justin Louis as Trump.
Trump appeared with Rudy Giuliani in the 2005 documentary Giuliani Time.You've Been Trumped (2011), a documentary film, follows Trump's efforts to develop a Scottish golf resort. When the BBC announced it would show the film in 2012, Trump's lawyers demanded that the film should not be shown, saying that it was defamatory and misleading. The BBC showed the film, defending the decision and stating that Trump had refused the opportunity to take part in the film.
In 2016, Funny or Die released a parody film called Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie with Johnny Depp portraying Trump. Trump was also portrayed by Jeff Rector in the 2020 fantasy comedy film Bad President.
As the October 2015 date featured in the Back to the Future films approached, media outlets began noting similarities between the older version of the Biff Tannen character in Back to the Future Part II and then-presidential candidate Trump.Lee, Benjamin, Back to the Future writer: bad guy Biff was based on Donald Trump , The Guardian, October 23, 2015 Screenwriter Bob Gale said, "Yeah. That's what we were thinking about." Rolling Stone observes that Biff "resides in a palatial penthouse atop a casino, which bears a striking resemblance to the Trump Plaza Hotel".
The 2018 Chinese comedy-mystery film Detective Chinatown 2 features a police chief who is portrayed as a Donald Trump lookalike. The character's appearance and mannerisms resemble Trump, and a portrait of Trump is visible behind him in one scene. The character also makes a joke about the United States' immigration policies, saying that the president should build a wall on the West Coast to keep Asians out. The film was also described by the China Film Association as using the connection between the police chief and Trump to satirize Trump and his domestic and foreign policies.
Trump is a character in the 2019 English-Belgian CGI comedy The Queen's Corgi. In the film, he and Melania Trump along with their dog Mitzi visit Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth. The film received negative reviews on this depiction and satire.
The independent biopic The Apprentice, about Trump's early years as a real estate developer and the relationship with attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong) premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. For his portrayal of Trump, Sebastian Stan received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations as Best Lead Actor. The Trump campaign denounced the movie as sensationalizing long-debunked lies and said it would be filing a lawsuit.
GamesTrump Castle is a series of gambling simulation video games, named after Trump's Castle hotel and casino, published between 1989 and 1993. Trump: The Game, a board game inspired by Monopoly, was released in 1989. A second version was released in 2004, riding on the popularity of Trump's reality show The Apprentice. Donald Trump's Real Estate Tycoon, a business simulation computer game, was released in 2002. The computer game The Apprentice: Los Angeles, released in 2007, was based on the TV-series.
Trumptendo, a website with NES games hacked to include Trump, was launched in 2016. It included games like Punch-Out!! and Super Mario Bros.Mr. President!, a satirical video game about saving president "Ronald Rump" from getting assassinated, got released in 2016 prior to the U.S. presidential election. The game went viral among YouTubers, and saw a resurgence in 2024 after the attempted assassination of Trump.
Literature
Donald Trump, along with the Trump Tower, is depicted in the 1986 novel I'll Take Manhattan. Trump himself appears in the 1987 miniseries adaptation.
In American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, protagonist Patrick Bateman seeks to emulate Trump, dining at restaurants Trump patronized and advising a police officer investigating his murders to read The Art of the Deal.
A parody of Trump is the main villain in the 1992 The Destroyer novel Ghost in the Machine.
The erotic novel Trump Tower (2011) includes Trump as a character. It was originally marketed as authored by Trump.
Andrew Shaffer's satirical book, The Day of the Donald (2016), imagines Trump winning the 2016 presidential election and discusses his second year as America's 45th president. Shaffer initially wrote and published the book on believing Trump would not win his 2016 election.
The television series Twin Peaks (2017) features a mysterious artifact called the "Owl Cave ring". In Mark Frost's book Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017), it is implied that Trump may have worn this ring.
In The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump (2017), the poems are composed of lines taken from Trump's tweets and speeches, with attribution added to every line of verse.
The 2018 poetry collection Sincerity by Carol Ann Duffy, British Poet Laureate, includes a poem entitled "Swearing In". It begins "Combover ... twitter-rat, tweet-twat, tripe-gob, muckspout", includes the expressions "tie-treader", and "mandrake mymmerkin", and ends "welcome to the White House".Dumpty is a 2019 satirical poetry book by John Lithgow. The poems are about Trump and people in his administration.