Trump Is Putting His Face on Everything

We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.COMPLETEDTrump’s face has appeared swiftly, often with little warning—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. To find a comparable leader so fixated on the proliferation of his image, the historians I spoke with reached across oceans and time: The face of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for nearly three decades, was printed on children’s schoolbook covers; Mussolini covered Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with a display featuring his head. Obviously Mao Zedong comes to mind. This creation of a cult of personality is partly how strongmen have sought to erase memories of their predecessors and “insert themselves into the social fabric,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at NYU, told me. There may not be a perfect comparison, but past regimes offer clues, the scholars said, about how a leader’s ubiquity can help inure citizens to broader shifts in their relationship to their government.Kevin Carter / GettyTrump’s face—staring back at federal workers, residents, and tourists from banners draped on agencies such as the Labor Department—sends a message that “he is inseparable from these more impersonal institutions of governance,” says Lisa Wedeen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.Kevin Carter / GettyA banner featuring the president’s face appeared on the Agriculture Department (right) last year, but was taken down soon after. Banners similar to it remain on the Labor, Justice (left), and Interior (center) Departments, despite objections by Democrats over the cost and the message they send—especially at the Justice Department, which, particularly since Watergate, has tried to operate autonomously from the president, for all sorts of obvious reasons.Anna Moneymaker / GettyThe U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, had Donald J. Trump added to its name in December, even as a battle over the administration’s efforts to take control of the institute continues to play out in court. Kevin Dietsch / GettyThe John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts likewise has become the target of a Trump takeover. The center, initially named the National Cultural Center, was renamed for Kennedy through an act of Congress two months afte