Trump makes America’s 250th birthday all about himself
In 1864, a US Treasury bureaucrat called Spencer M Clark, who had a fluffy white beard and worked in the printing department, decided to pull a prank on the government, and put his own face on the five-cent note. Congress was outraged, and a law was passed to prevent anyone still living from featuring on one of the nation’s most recognisable objects. It was thought unbecoming for a republic to lionise anyone who was still alive to enjoy the honour – especially given the US’s history with an empire whose monarch’s head appeared on every coin and note. So, of course, as this same republic celebrates its semiquincentennial, Donald Trump is pressuring the nation’s currency printers to put his own likeness on a $250 bill created to mark the occasion.
Never one to miss an opportunity to conflate the nation with himself, Trump is using the anniversary to plaster over symbols of American identity and democracy with the Trump brand. The Federal Arts Commission has signed off a 24-carat gold coin bearing Trump’s likeness. An Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fight on the White House lawn will take place on 14 June – the president’s birthday. A limited number of passports will be issued with Trump’s picture and signature. And $100 notes with his signature – a first for a sitting president – are already being printed at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This is “not only appropriate, but also well deserved,” Brandon Beach, the treasurer, said.
After several musicians pulled out of the flagship “Freedom 250” series of concerts to be held on Washington’s National Mall, Trump has said he will replace them with the “number one attraction anywhere in the world” – himself. AI images of a towering presidential library in Miami, which has all the steel and glass of a Trump hotel, have been lauded by his son Eric. Trump’s followers in Congress have proposed a bill to carve his face into Mount Rushmore.
Trump has seemingly taken leave from politics in order to canonise himself while he is still living. He wants to witness his own immortalisation. “I don’t care about the midterms,” he has said. He has also said that he doesn’t care about how his war in Iran impacts Americans’ finances, but that amounts to the same thing. And we have little reason to think he is lying. Only two things matter to Trump at the moment: bombing disobedient countries abroad and planting his name on as many gaudy monuments at home as he can corral the financing for. In February, he said he would unfreeze funds for infrastructure projects in New York and New Jersey if Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport were renamed after him.
Last year, the narrative sweeping through the political commentariat was that Trump’s style of government was patrimonial – a tribal, anti-bureaucratic and almost ancient approach that takes away from enemies and gives to friends. That was true then – but he no longer seems to be working within as capacious a framework. Remember Doge? Tariffs? The Great Big Beautiful Bill? The corruption persists, naturally: he recently announced a slush fund with $1.776bn in taxpayers’ money from which his supporters can claim compensation for supposed persecution by the Biden administration (although the White House is reportedly pulling back from the scheme). But Trump is preoccupied with seeing his face when he opens his wallet, as if that will secure his legacy as a great American leader. His agenda has narrowed from inaugurating a golden age to something as small as a profile picture.
And all this takes up a lot of time for his lieutenants, who are trying to seal his legacy through a process of civil deification. Dissenters within the bureaucracy are moved on, while loyalists are brought in. Trump wants to see how he will be remembered before he dies, to construct a superficial memory of his reign before historians sharpen their knives.
There is a desperation to all this. But then, it’s not entirely new. Trump’s metric for success has always been money and how many times he can see his name spelled out for everyone to see. You can imagine him wide-eyed in the printing room watching gleefully as the Trump name and the American dollar become one and the same.
There’s a tragic irony to reading about American anniversaries past. On 4 July 1976, the bicentennial, Gerald Ford said: “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order – the fixed star of freedom. It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” Yet one of the most consistent ideological positions set forth by both Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, is that the Declaration of Independence is not about moral truths, but the nationalism of a specific people living within specific borders. They are changing its meaning through re-interpretation. Nothing is impervious to this president’s avarice.
Congress may have moved quickly in the 1860s to overturn that Treasury bureaucrat’s egotistical flourish, but it doesn’t have the same impetus today. Members of Congress are cowed by the fact that the president’s selected candidates in several primaries have beaten the Republicans who have broken the omertà surrounding Trump’s fallibility. His unpopularity in national polls is no match for the fear he inspires in Washington and the adoration his base still has for him around the country. As Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “This is the party of Donald Trump.” Yes, and America’s 250th anniversary has become an encomium to one man.
[Further reading: Donald Trump’s definition of “beauty”]
