Trump Is Putting His Face On Everything

COMPLETED

Trump’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.

IN THE WORKS

The Kennedy Center debacle offered the president a reminder: “Letters can easily be taken off of the surface of buildings,” Lawrence Vale, an MIT urban-planning professor who studies capital-city design and national identity, told me. Come 2029, if a Democrat wins back the White House, it’s difficult to imagine the Trump-faced banners and paintings remaining up for long. Other things—multimillion-dollar monuments, travel documents, money in circulation—would be far more challenging to undo.

Read more The Incoherence of Trump’s Past Week of Foreign Policy

ON TRUMP’S WISH LIST

Trump—and those in his orbit looking to flatter him—will almost certainly propose more places for his name and face to appear. The president could grow dissatisfied with having his name on just one airport, especially one that serves fewer than 10 million people a year. Or the new football stadium coming to Washington might grab his attention. And, of course, there is his obsession with being on Mount Rushmore. Many ideas that seemed improbable when they were first introduced have since been carried out.

The tenures of previous world leaders obsessed with imparting their images onto history have yielded troves of artifacts—and left successors with the question of what to do with them all.

As Hungary’s Communist era came to an end, the government confronted one such quandary. Budapest’s new government didn’t want to melt statues down or discard them, so in 1993, it deposited dozens of them in a park 20 minutes outside the city center. In one sense, the park became an oversize storage unit for junk the Hungarian public no longer needed; in another, it was a tourist attraction in its own right—a memorial to the way that a past regime had sought to memorialize itself.