President Donald Trump’s mission to build monuments to himself is growing, and there’s a real reason behind why the nation’s 47th president is defying tradition and putting his name on so many things while he’s still in office — and still alive.
“Donald Trump’s two favorite things are himself and money,” writes Windsor Mann at The Daily Beast. “Now he has decided to combine the two. Indeed, for the first time in history, the sitting president is adding his signature to our paper currency. Trump’s name will be on your money, which is his way of saying that he owns you.”
Mann notes that the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is now, albeit unofficially, the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
The U.S. Institute of Peace is now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, and, “Trump reportedly floated the idea of renaming Penn Station after himself during negotiations over federal funds for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey.”
The president is not the only one naming things after himself.
In 2024, House Republicans pushed legislation to rename Washington Dulles International Airport the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”
“And last November,” Mann notes, “Florida State Rep. Meg Weinberger introduced a bill to rename the Palm Beach International Airport as another ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’ Sure, why not?”
Spending $300,000 on a two-story tall statue of Trump, a group of crypto investors installed it on Trump’s Doral, Florida golf course.
“It is, like the man it commemorates, vulgar and excessive,” says Mann. “But one thing it is not is unnecessary, at least not from the vantage point of these investors. The way to Trump’s heart is through his ego, and nothing satiates his ego as much as a graven image made in his image and at someone else’s expense.”
Pointing to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial — all built years after their namesakes’ passing — Mann notes that “we memorialize presidents once public opinion and historians have had time to reach a consensus as to whether their contributions merit commemoration.”
Which, perhaps, is why Trump is rushing to do so now.
“After all, what if we built a statue of someone who turned out to be in the Epstein files or who, after losing an election, tried to overthrow our democracy?” Mann asks. “It would be costly and tedious to dismantle a statue of such a person after these revelations surfaced. Perhaps Trump realizes this, which is why he’s building not one monument to himself but scores of them.”
