Are you sitting restlessly? Then I’ll begin by explaining that I am always trying to look on the bright side of the dark horror of the Trump presidency. And, doing that, I point to the ways in which Trump is, unintentionally, making an inspiring contribution to the arts.

His major contribution, of which more in a moment, is his barbaric and hare-brained vision of his “big, beautiful wall” erected along the USA/Mexico border to keep Mexican scum out of the USA. Some very fine architects, designers and artists are finding the whole vile idea inspirational in the extreme.

In other creative fields, too, Trump has stimulated a blizzard of creative protesting.

For example this very week up pops, online, accomplished Canadian bard Steven Heighton’s brand-new poem Fake News - An American bodyguard foresees his death.

You can read the poem and then read all about its creation online in Heighton’s piece Why I Wrote a Poem Imagining Donald Trump’s Attempted Assassination. Questing readers will find it online in Canada’s splendid magazine The Walrus.

In Heighton’s poem an American bodyguard, a member of an elite team employed to protect Trump, imagines having to take a bullet for a president he (the bodyguard) thinks is a “clown” barely worth protecting.

Yes, he is a clown, the American bodyguard muses, but if someone does attempt to assassinate this clown then the bodyguard knows “my Navy seal–trained nerves” will kick in, and:

I’ll cloak him like a flak
vest of flesh, pin him down behind the podium,
block bullets with my skull, spine …

Cultured readers will notice that Heighton is echoing (he explains this in his Walrus piece) the sentiments of W.B. Yeats’ monumental poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, a condemnation of mindless patriotism you are unlikely to hear recited at an Anzac Day ceremony. It begins:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love …

Painters and sculptors, too, have made some memorable Trump works. Among the most enduring of them (in every sense) is Maurizio Catellan’s America, a solid gold lavatory seat/pedestal of the kind installed in Trump’s ostentatious Manhattan apartment mansion. The Guggenheim has snapped up this masterpiece.

Inspired painted portraits of Trump include Illma Gore’s (alas) unforgettable portrait of a naked and unspeakably fleshy Trump. Looking at it, the eye is led (against one’s will) to that teeny-weeny part of him that one suspects does most of his big thinking for him.

A Trump-era masterpiece is the elegant grey granite headstone with the engraved testament that the man buried here “Made America Hate Again”. Artist X first installed it in a grassy place in Central Park (authorities eventually whisked it away) where it looked authentically cemeteryesque.

But the biggest, best Trump-propelled inspirations of all have to do with his imagined “big, beautiful wall”. There is something about the grand scale of this atrocious, hare-brained brainwave that creative minds are finding irresistible. If I have become an internet Ph.D student of this phenomenon it is because with one of the worst Americans in the White House, one wants to be reminded of all that’s excellent, talented and ingenious about the minds of the best Americans. America’s genius will surely survive this blip. Trump’s nightmarish idea (the wall) has inspired in better, brighter, other Americans some ingenious dreaming.

The thousands of artistic ideas about the wall (with there being a popular whimsy that Trump’s imagining of the wall makes him a “conceptual artist” in his own right) imagine the forms the wall might take, its shapes, its materials, the murals its gigantic walls might host.

Some of the best imaginings were among the entries in the Build the Border Wall international competition organised by the USA’s Third Mind Foundation of progressive architects, designers and artists. All of the prize winners rejected the idea of a fixed wall that divides nations and people. And so, for example, the second prize (given to a team of New York dreamers) went to the idea that there should be a “bi-national park running the length of the border that is ‘a symbol against difference’ where people from both sides [Mexicans and Americans] can camp, hike and engage in other outdoor activities”.

Other ideas imagined a wall made of several million turnstiles (fancying the USA as a glittering ball game that the world’s fans want to get in to see).

Then, the jmeridian studio (a Pittsburgh arts collective) conceived “a semi-continuous line of nearly 10 million pipe organs, in a line that follows the entire border”.

“They stand at nearly [10 metres] high and at every [seven metres] there is an opening, like an archway, which allows anyone from either side to walk through, but pausing to sit and play a tune on the organ. This is a wall of music.”

Another poetic jmeridian proposal is a welcoming ‘wall’ made of three million hammocks slung right along the length of the border between hundreds of thousands of tall pine trees.

“Anyone would be able to lounge in the hammocks,” jmeridian CDO (chief dreaming officer) Jennifer Meridian, the best kind of American and an American inspired by this worst kind of American, this head clown, invites.