Even as a pope
Peter Baker on Trump’s personality cult:
After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.
One thing that’s interesting about that is the focus on quantity as opposed to quality. Trump is going for the Too Dumb to Notice crowd as opposed to the Not That Dumb one. The more he leans into the vulgar boasting the more he disgusts the kind of people he wants flattering him.
While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman and omnipresent persona leading to idolatry.
Not least because it doesn’t work, because it can’t work. See above. It’s grotesquely trashy and absurd behavior, so it’s only going to appeal to trashy absurd people and crooks.
Many presidents have enjoyed being the center of attention. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth notably said her father “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” Others struggled with that kind of politics. George H.W. Bush painfully tried to avoid the first-person singular “I” in sentences because growing up his mother taught him that it sounded boastful.
Boastful is not something Mr. Trump ever learned to avoid, nor can he fathom why predecessors passed on self-promotion. When he visited Mount Vernon during his first term, he expressed surprise that Washington did not name the estate for himself. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” Mr. Trump told people.
And by “stuff” he meant “everything”.
And by legacy, we mean Trump is the absolute stupidest person to hold the office, or any office. His “branding” of everything is nothing more than vandalism.
Bush Sr.’s mom and the use of “I” is very relatable to me with that generation I learned from, but humility is all but gone in today’s world. Trump and Trumpism is not blameless in that.
Right, because nobody remembers George Washington. I think that a a base level Trump understands that unlike Washington, who has a state, a district housing the seat of the US government, a mountain, a state park, a museum, etc. etc. named for him, it is highly unlikely that Trump himself will be so honoured, which is why he’s doing it for himself, starting with the Kennedy Arts Centre. There are no prizes for guessing what the new East Wing will be called, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it were revealed that he had plans to rename Greenland had his fever dream come to fruition.
If he could, Trump would make these people love him. By law. Never mind that, as you pointed out, this kind of vulgar braggidocio can’t work, he can’t see the difference between genuine regard and coerced flattery. He would see any success of his infrastructure funding/blackmail scheme to rename Dulles Airport and Penn Station after himself as a spontaneous outpouring of adoration and affection. He would forget the ugliness of his extortionate demand and bask in the glow of even more things stamped with his name in gold letters.
This weakness for such transparently false flattery is what makes him so easily played and led. He thinks the world is bowing down to him when it’s leading him by the nose. He’s not the tough guy feared and respected by all, he’s the drooling, lunatic uncle at the Christams dinner that everyone indulges with smiles and nods, who is convinced that the tissue paper crown in the cracker is really gold, and that it endows him with real power.