Then there is the proposed 250-foot triumphal arch near the National Mall, taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and decorated with giant eagles and golden lions.⁶ Triumphal arches have always had a fairly specific message. Roman emperors built them after victories; Napoleon ordered the Arc de Triomphe after Austerlitz. They were not just decorative gateways. They said: Look what I did. Remember who did it.
Trump seems unwilling to leave that part to future generations.
That may be the strangest part of all this. American presidents traditionally have to wait. They accomplish whatever they are going to accomplish, leave office, die, and then history gets a vote. Washington did not build the Washington Monument; construction began almost half a century after his death.⁷ Lincoln did not wander down to the Mall to make sure the Lincoln Memorial was coming along properly.
Trump is cutting out the middleman.
His appointees have tried to put his name on the Kennedy Center and rename its grounds the President Donald J. Trump Plaza, despite litigation over whether they have the authority to do it.⁸ The branding goes well beyond buildings. We now have Trump Accounts for children,⁹ TrumpRx,¹⁰ and the Trump Gold Card, which may be the purest piece of Trump nomenclature yet because it manages to combine immigration policy, wealth, branding and gold in three syllables.
Then there is the money. Trump’s signature is now appearing on the $100 bill, ending a 165-year tradition in which American banknotes carried the signature of the Treasurer of the United States. Federal law still bars the portrait of a living president from paper currency.¹¹ Apparently nobody thought to prohibit the autograph.
None of this makes Trump Napoleon or Louis XIV, and those comparisons get silly fast. But both understood something Trump understands very well: buildings, names and symbols tell people who matters. Louis XIV turned Versailles into an expression of royal power; its official history says he understood that “glory was conveyed not only by war but also by buildings.”¹²
Trump comes from a different tradition, but the instinct is familiar. Trump Tower. Trump Plaza. Trump casinos. Trump steaks. Trump vodka. Trump University. For most of his adult life, if there was enough empty space for five giant letters, there was a business opportunity. The formula was simple: make something look expensive, put TRUMP on it, and make the name part of what you were selling.
For most of his career, the product belonged to Trump or to someone licensing his name.
Now the product is America.
That is what bothers me, and it has almost nothing to do with whether Trump has terrible taste. I do not care that he likes gold. Some people like Scandinavian minimalism. Some like chintz. Trump appears to prefer living inside a Rolex. Fine. The real problem is the slow merger of Donald Trump the man, Donald Trump the brand and the presidency of the United States.
Presidents have always been vain. Hoover Dam was named for Herbert Hoover while Hoover was president,¹³ and Ronald Reagan eventually got an airport. But nobody gave us HooverRx. There was no Reagan Gold Card. Nobody proposed putting Gerald Ford’s autograph on the hundred-dollar bill.
One example can be shrugged off as vanity. What makes Trump different is the accumulation: the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center, the government programs, the currency, the granite, the gold, the names. After a while, it stops looking like commemoration and starts looking like rebranding.
George Washington had people around him quite willing to make the presidency more regal. Instead, he helped establish the idea that the office was bigger than the person occupying it, and then, after two terms, he went home. The country later put his face on the dollar and built him the biggest monument in Washington, but Washington was not standing beside the architect asking whether it could be taller and perhaps use a little more gold.
Trump seems less willing to leave his legacy to chance.