The taxpayers weren’t left much room to respond when the East Wing was demolished without notice. Gold molding can be painted over. An East Wing takes longer.
Then there’s the Kennedy Center, which already has a president’s name on it because Congress created it as a memorial to John F. Kennedy. Trump’s board tried adding Donald Trump’s name. A federal judge ruled that it lacked authority to rename the institution, and the board has since proposed new inscriptions crediting Trump with its restoration and naming the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”⁴ Apparently the Kennedy Center’s problem isn’t that it has a president’s name on it. It has the wrong president’s name.
Once you start noticing this stuff, it turns up everywhere. Trump Accounts are now the official name of a Treasury savings program for children.⁵ The federal government has an official Trump Gold Card immigration program.⁶ There is a presidential Walk of Fame at the White House, where Joe Biden is represented not by a normal portrait but by an autopen.⁷ That last one is almost admirable in its pettiness. There are seventh-graders who would look at it and say, “Come on, grow up.”
Presidents have always had egos. This is not a job that attracts people crippled by self-doubt. But usually we wait awhile before turning them into monuments. Washington had the courtesy to be dead for decades before we started building the Washington Monument. Lincoln did not put himself on the five-dollar bill. The normal sequence has been: do something, leave office, die eventually, then let everybody else argue about what should be named after you.
Trump appears to regard that as needless government red tape.
Psychologists have been studying this side of him for years. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner called Trump “remarkably narcissistic.”⁸ Northwestern personality psychologist Dan McAdams has been more precise. He said Trump works extraordinarily hard at “promoting the self,” including “putting your name on everything,” and called self-promotion a key feature of Trump’s motivational life.⁹ ¹⁰
The more interesting psychology, though, isn’t the vanity itself. It’s what happens when somebody refuses to admire it. Psychologists have studied this under labels including “threatened egotism” and provoked aggression. A 2021 meta-analysis examined 437 studies involving 123,043 people and found a relationship between narcissism and aggression that became significantly stronger when the person was provoked.¹¹ In other words, the gold may be funny; the reaction when somebody refuses to admire it may be more consequential.
Suddenly a lot of Trump stories stop looking random. The Associated Press said it would continue calling the Gulf of Mexico by its internationally recognized name while noting Trump’s “Gulf of America” designation. Trump then explicitly said the AP would continue to be restricted from some presidential events until it changed its terminology.¹² He saw a portrait of himself in the Colorado Capitol that he thought was “purposefully distorted,” complained publicly, and Republican legislative leaders requested that it come down. It did.¹³
Then there was John McCain. After McCain died, the White House flag was raised back to full staff while the senator was still being mourned and was lowered again only after criticism from veterans groups and politicians of both parties.¹⁴ Months later, White House officials asked that the USS John S. McCain be kept out of Trump’s sight during his visit to Japan. Trump said he did not order it, although he described whoever had done it as “well-meaning.”¹⁵ That is an impressive commitment to grievance.
This is where the funny part stops being entirely funny. A president liking gold is not a constitutional crisis. A president wanting a flattering portrait is not the end of the republic. The real problem comes when personal vanity is backed by public power.
If a billionaire doesn’t like TV news, he can watch another channel. If a president doesn’t like the news and cancels the station's license, that’s different. If a private citizen doesn’t like a lawyer, professor, prosecutor, museum, university or former official, he can complain about them over dinner. If the president doesn’t like them, there are suddenly federal agencies available.