'Drunk on power': Experts say Trump's cult of personality rivals history's worst dictators

President Donald Trump’s cult of personality is reaching a whole new level in his second term.

New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that Trump has always been obsessed with his own image and with slapping his name on buildings; now that impulse is escalating. It’s not just that Trump put his name above the sign for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His supporters are also building a gold‑plated bronze statue version of him. The 15-foot-tall Trump will tower over his Miami golf course. It will be called “Don Colossus,” and while the name sounds like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, the project is very real.

The branding push goes beyond his base. Baker reports that the administration is considering a new class of battleships that would also bear Trump’s name. Staff is already suggesting that Trump will name his ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, after himself. One conservative even joked that Trump should simply rename the moon after himself.

“This is a man drunk on power with an already enormous ego that was further inflated by winning the presidency again — and the popular vote,” said Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in Trump’s first administration, who, like many others, eventually walked away. “It reinforces the perception that this presidency is more about elevating one man than serving the country.”

“This is not just egotistical self‑satisfaction, it’s a way of expanding presidential power,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. “A president is more powerful, I assume he believes, if he is ever‑present than if he keeps his head down.”

Baker compares Trump’s self‑glorification to that of dictators such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Benito Mussolini, and writes that Trump seems unconcerned he may be heading down a dangerous path. At rallies, Trump regularly boasts of being a “strong” leader; at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he went further, embracing the label.

“Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator‑type person, I’m a dictator,’” Trump said in his trademark rambling style. “But sometimes, you need a dictator.”

Baker notes that America’s first president, George Washington, may loom large in Trump’s mind. Washington appointed the commission that ultimately named the nation’s capital after him.

“He was surprised that the commissioners chose the name, though he did not object,” biographer David O. Stewart told Baker. “As near as the evidence shows, George Washington very much liked having the city named after him. He was not without ego, and devoted great energy and attention to developing the capital city.”

Other major memorials — the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials — were built after those leaders’ deaths. Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” told the Times that, historically, presidents have not named things after themselves.

She argues there is a crucial difference between a beloved leader being honored by others and a president using political power and taxpayer dollars to plaster his own name on public projects.

Trump’s loyalists are all in. “President Trump is going to go down in history as the most successful and consequential president in our lifetime,” communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. “He built the most powerful political and cultural movement ever. His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him.”