Historically, it has been exceedingly rare for an American president to affix his own name to the permanent architecture of the republic while still occupying the office. The restraint was not merely a matter of etiquette, but of constitutional hygiene. The United States, unlike the tin-pot autocracies it once claimed to despise, developed an instinctive aversion to self-canonization. Statues, ships, and sanctuaries were reserved for the dead, or at least for the safely departed—precisely to prevent the presidency from curdling into a cult of personality.
Washington refused a crown. Jefferson demurred at monuments. Lincoln was murdered before myth making could tempt him. Even the most vain of twentieth-century presidents—men who enjoyed applause, portraits, libraries, and the occasional mountain understood the difference between legacy and self-advertisement. The rule was simple and unspoken: history may judge you, but you do not get to grade your own exam.
In this sense, the tradition was not modesty so much as prophylaxis, a recognition that power, when allowed to admire itself too openly, metastasizes.
Donald Trump’s second term, however, has been marked by a conspicuous impatience with such inhibitions. In December 2025, the president announced a cascade of initiatives that—taken together—represent not a lapse of decorum but a wholesale repudiation of it. These gestures do not merely bend historical convention; they sneer at it. They are not accidents or indulgences. They are declarations.
Consider first the proposed christening of a new class of U.S. Navy warships as the “Trump-class.” For more than a century, American capital ships bore the names of states, Arizona, Missouri, Iowa a convention rooted in federal balance and collective identity. These names were not chosen for flattery but for symbolism: the union afloat, steel-plated and shared. To substitute this tradition with the name of a living president is to replace the republic with the résumé. It transforms the Navy from a national institution into a personal accessory, as though force projection were now an extension of brand management.
This is not merely tasteless. It is pedagogical. It teaches sailors, allies, and adversaries alike that American power no longer speaks in the voice of continuity, but in the accent of ownership.
More jarring still was the decision by the board of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to approve a renaming that grafts Trump’s name onto Kennedy’s. “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” reads less like an honorific than a leveraged buyout. Kennedy—whatever one thinks of the Camelot mythology—symbolized restraint, internationalism, and a tragic awareness of the presidency’s limits. He spoke of public service, not personal tally-keeping. To weld his memorial to Trump’s self-bestowed legacy is not tribute but annexation, as if history itself were being forced into co-branding.
It is the architectural equivalent of tagging a monument: history spray-painted with a signature.
The rechristening of the U.S. Institute of Peace as the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” completes the inversion. An institution founded to encourage diplomacy and conflict resolution now bears the name of a president whose instincts consistently favor domination over reconciliation. The irony is not accidental; it is declarative. In Trump’s political cosmology, peace is not something negotiated or maintained, it is something claimed, preferably loudly, and preferably with one’s name embossed on the façade.
Peace, in this formulation, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of submission.
Nor does the impulse stop at institutions. Congressional allies have proposed renaming Washington Dulles International Airport the “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” converting a gateway to the nation into yet another billboard. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” even designating a ceremonial “Gulf of America Day,” as if geography itself were subject to executive whim and rebranding rights.
The administration launched a federal prescription-drug website under the domain TrumpRx.com, ensuring that even subsidized insulin would arrive bearing the presidential watermark. House Republicans floated redesigning the $100 bill to feature Trump’s face. Another proposal would make the president’s birthday a national holiday, a practice not unfamiliar in history, though it tends to appear less in republics than in regimes that prefer banners to ballots. One recalls, uncomfortably, who else insisted on calendrical worship—and who found no objection to sanctifying it.
Even the family branding has been incorporated. An amendment advanced to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House after the First Lady. New tax-deferred investment vehicles for children are slated to launch as “Trump Accounts,” ensuring that civic participation, financial literacy, and childhood itself arrive pre-monogrammed.
Finally comes the perfect symbol: the commemorative legal-tender coin featuring Trump’s face on both sides. Currency, like monuments, is meant to outlast its issuers. It is a daily reminder that the state endures beyond any single officeholder. To place one’s likeness on both faces of money while still in office is not merely narcissistic; it is symbolically totalizing. There is no heads or tails, no obverse and reverse, no public and counterweight. Only the face remains, staring back from every transaction, demanding recognition.
Taken individually, these acts might be dismissed as vanity projects or theatrical excesses—the sort of behavior that invites satire rather than alarm. Taken together, they reveal something far more coherent and far more dangerous: an impatience with the idea that the presidency is an office one inhabits rather than a brand one owns. This is not merely self-regard. It is an attempt to rewrite the grammar of American public life, replacing civic honor with self-endorsement and institutional memory with personal mythology.
The danger is not that Trump wants to be admired. Many politicians do. The danger is that he seeks to collapse the distance between himself and the state, to make criticism feel like heresy, dissent like vandalism, and neutrality like treason.
A republic can survive bad presidents. It can even survive dishonest ones. What it struggles to survive is the normalization of rulers who erect their own monuments while still issuing orders, because at that point the monument is no longer a remembrance of power. It is power announcing that it intends to stay.
Why It Matters
A republic survives only when leaders understand that power is temporary and institutions endure. When a sitting president names warships, monuments, money, and public institutions after himself, the presidency ceases to be a civic role and becomes a personal brand. History shows that this is not harmless vanity, it is the psychological groundwork of authoritarianism. Democracies do not fall all at once; they are renamed, repackaged, and slowly taught to worship power instead of restraining it.
Key Takeaways
- Self-canonization by a living president breaks a foundational American norm meant to prevent cults of personality
- Naming ships, institutions, currency, and holidays after oneself collapses the boundary between leader and state
- These actions mirror patterns seen in authoritarian regimes, not constitutional republics
- When criticism of leadership feels like heresy, democracy is already in retreat
- The danger is not admiration, it is power declaring permanence
Further Reading – Bookshop.org
- The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt. A definitive examination of how personal power replaces institutions in collapsing democracies. https://civilheresy.com/the origins of totalitarianism
- How Democracies Die – Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt. Explains how norms, not laws, are the first casualties of authoritarian ambition. https://civilheresy.com/how democracies die
- The Cult of Personality – Annie Kriegel. A historical analysis of how leaders transform governance into self-worship. https://civilheresy.com/cult of personality
History doesn’t crown kings — people do.
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