Writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers has described the Donald Trump White House as a "cultural vacuum" in an editorial in The New York Times.
The novelist, best known for his 2000 novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in the editorial criticizes Trump's White House for its failure to champion the arts, and for the president's attacks on artists critical of his policies.
"This White House has been, and is likely to remain, home to the first presidency in American history that is almost completely devoid of culture," he writes.
"In the 17 months that Donald Trump has been in office, he has hosted only a few artists of any kind. One was the gun fetishist Ted Nugent. Another was Kid Rock. They went together (and with Sarah Palin). Neither performed."
While previous presidents, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, frequently hosted concerts, since Trump's January 2017 inauguration, Eggers writes, "there have been no official concerts at the White House."
He also criticises the president for his attacks on artists including the cast of the musical Hamilton, and Oscar-winning actor Meryl Streep.
'Never have we had a president not just indifferent to the arts, but actively oppositional to artists," writes Eggers who goes on to contrasts sponsorship of the arts in free societies to the hostility towards the arts in totalitarian regimes.
"Every great civilization has fostered great art, while authoritarian regimes customarily see artists as either nuisances, enemies of the state or tools for the creation of propaganda," he writes.
Trump has positioned himself as a brash challengers to political and cultural elites, championing fast food over fine dining, shrugging off criticism of his indifference to reading, and declaring on the 2016 presidential campaign trail his "love" for the "poorly educated."
He has championed artists who have praised him, including actor Roseanne Barr, and this week director David Lynch distanced himself from the president after Trump claimed he had earned the Twin Peaks creator's praise.
At a time when Trump has imposed a policy of forcibly separating children from their undocumented immigrant parents at the border, Eggers remarks, "the White House's attitude toward the arts seems relatively unimportant."
"But with art comes empathy. It allows us to look through someone else's eyes and know their strivings and struggles. It expands the moral imagination and makes it impossible to accept the dehumanization of others. When we are without art, we are a diminished people—myopic, unlearned and cruel."
Eggers is not the first novelist to have criticised Trump's apparent lack of cultural sophistication, with late novelist Philip Roth in an email to The New Yorker last year describing Trump as "ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English."
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