Should Americans worry about a Trumpification of their public spaces and government documents?

The Treasury Department announced in March that, for “the first time in history for a sitting president,” Donald Trump’s signature will appear on future American paper currency. Government programs TrumpRx and Trump accounts carry the president’s name, while the Trump Gold Card, emblazoned with Trump’s portrait and signature, promises U.S. residency in exchange for a $1 million “contribution” (plus a $15,000 Department of Homeland Security processing fee). Gold coins and limited-edition passports commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary will feature the president’s image.

Trump’s face and signature are seemingly everywhere, and if the Trump Organization’s trademarking of a “Trump 250” image for merchandise including bumper stickers and golf balls is any indication, the end is not in sight.

While the Trump-themed passports reportedly only will be issued in Washington, D.C., all annual resident “America the Beautiful” passes for national parks sport Trump’s likeness alongside George Washington’s. The National Park Service has announced that any pass that obscures or defaces Trump’s image is void.

This proliferation of Trump images has been accompanied by a flurry of presidential passion projects: a ballroom being constructed at the White House, the People’s House, on the site where the historic East Wing once stood; a 250-foot-tall gilded Triumphal Arch (dubbed the “Arc de Trump”) projected to loom over Arlington National Cemetery and to dwarf the Lincoln Memorial; and a White House “presidential walk of fame” featuring plaques and portraits, some labeled with dubious historical accuracy by Trump himself.

Last December, Trump announced the debut of a “golden fleet” of the new “Trump class” of battleships, extolled by the then-secretary of the Navy as “the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”

With the renaming of the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, even preexisting institutions now seek to secure Trump’s legacy.

Lancaster County residents who visit Washington, D.C., this summer may see a historic landscape transformed.

The Trump brand

Trump’s fixation on spreading his name and image is well recognized, nationally and internationally.

As The New York Times reported, in an effort to secure a U.S. military base, Poland proposed naming it “Fort Trump” in 2018, and in a peace agreement with Azerbaijan last year, Armenia dubbed a new transit corridor the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (the acronym, TRIPP, could be interpreted in multiple ways).

Last month, in a desperate effort to win American support for retaining a portion of northwestern Donetsk, Ukrainian officials floated the idea of renaming it “Donnyland,” even proposing an artificial intelligence-generated Donnyland flag in the hues of gold and green.

As a businessman, Donald Trump was well-known for real estate and self-branding. If a number of his ventures — Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks — failed, all succeeded in spreading his name and image.

George Washington’s stance

Representing the U.S. government, however, has never before resembled marketing a family firm. Unsurprisingly, there is no precedent for such multifaceted veneration of a president during his own presidency, especially at his own behest.

As Jeffery Patterson, a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, explained May 7 on the public radio show “On Point,” “There is an idea within the United States ever since our founding, the idea that this is a government of the people and by the people and for the people, and so we give a reverence to the public sphere as a collective, not as an individual.”

Committed to his staunch anti-monarchical views, for example, George Washington famously refused to have his image appear on a coin. He did not become the face of the quarter until 1932, the 200th anniversary of his birth.

That is not to say that there is no historical model for such self-aggrandizement. It is just that past examples belong to dictators.

Personality cult

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a New York University professor of history and author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” She told NPR that we “are living through the building of a personality cult to Donald Trump,” wherein “the leader must be everywhere, his face must be everywhere, his name must be everywhere, and his aesthetic, his taste must be reflected in buildings, in the people around him. The autocrat wants to remake the world in his own image.”

The progenitor of the modern narcissistic personality cult, Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, sought to recreate the Roman Empire by building monumental edifices such as the Forum Mussolini, while adorning Rome with enormous sculptures and portraits highlighting his supposed virility and militarism.

Mussolini’s fascist followers called him “Il Duce,” which is Italian for “the leader.” Nazis likewise called Adolf Hitler “der Führer,” which means the same.

Hitler focused his architectural legacy on what was to be a new Berlin — Germania — after what the Nazis regarded as their inevitable victory in World War II. Designed by the Third Reich’s “first architect,” Albert Speer, to project the Führer’s global hegemony, most of Germania was never built because the Nazis were defeated. Its centerpiece was to have been a massive triumphal arch.

At the intersection of longing and narcissism

While personality cults exist in dictatorships from the fascist right to the communist left, they do not take hold in healthy democracies.

Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at Princeton University, has written that such cults live at the intersection of leaders’ narcissism and subjects’ longing for authority figures. Because cults don’t require subjects to grasp complex policies, political ideals operate at their most basic levels — patriarchy, political and military order, prophetic authority, etc.

When fully established, cults exempt the leader from responsibility for unpopular policies. (In Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and fascist Italy and Germany, loyal citizens frequently intoned, “If only the leader knew!”)

In the view of Jason Stanley, chair of American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and author of “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” personality cults render the previously unacceptable acceptable. The ubiquity of Trump’s image, Stanley suggested May 7 on “On Point,” induces government workers to equate Trump with the state. As soon as benefiting the country equals benefiting the leader, corruption on the scale of the Trump family’s enrichment — currently estimated by The New York Times at $1.4 billion — becomes possible.

If the ubiquity of the leader can dull subjects’ opposition through carrots like charisma and social order, it can also induce obedience with a big stick. As Meghna Chakrabarti, host of “On Point,” noted, the omnipresence of Big Brother in George Orwell’s iconic novel “1984” reminded subjects that the leader was watching. Victims’ self-incriminations during Stalin’s and Mao Zedong’s purges represented extreme versions of a cult’s core dynamic — self-abasement demonstrated by sycophants eager to please the leader.

But submission to authority hardly requires fear of the Gestapo or Stalinist show trials. How else to explain the huge taxpayer-funded banners projecting Trump’s face that have been hung on the exteriors of the Departments of Labor, Justice and Agriculture? Despite Trump’s disavowals that he suggested such symbolic reverence, he clearly relishes adulation like that of former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer who declared during a Cabinet meeting that she was so honored to unveil Trump’s “big beautiful face” outside the Labor Department building.

Indelibly altered?

With one Republican congressman beseeching Trump to sign his necktie printed with the president’s face and hats boasting that “Trump Was Right About Everything!” distributed in the Oval Office, the cult of personality among Trump’s most loyal supporters has claimed its own logic.

President Trump should not be the only American intently focused on his legacy. Will the ongoing Trumpification of American public life transform American political culture in a post-Trump era? Will this new normal leave an indelible mark? Despite a lawsuit lodged by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, ballroom construction proceeds, and survey work for the Triumphal Arch has begun, even as an architectural historian and three Vietnam War veterans sue to stop it.

But what will become of the broader relationship of citizens to presidential authority, especially younger Americans for whom Trump has defined politics and political culture? Can Americans reclaim the idea of a government of the people, by the people and for the people?

Maria D. Mitchell is a professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College. The views expressed here are entirely her own and do not reflect those of the college or its Department of History.