The futility of Trump’s grandiose personal branding of public assets, from ballrooms and bills to ships and planes

In a relentless, unprecedented branding exercise, the sheer volume of entities now bearing the name of President Donald Trump strains credulity. We now live in a world of Trump RX and Trump accounts, of Trump coins and Trump fighter jets. We have seen the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts slapped with his name, the Institute of Peace renamed after him, the christening of the President Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach, a new fleet of guided-missile warships designated as Trump-class destroyers, the Trump Gold Card visa for wealthy immigrants, and even the unprecedented stamp of his signature on U.S. paper currency, something reserved beforehand only for the Treasury Secretary.

Of course, that doesn’t even factor in the graveyard of branded detritus across Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage, Trump Fragrances, Trump Board Games, Trump Bibles, the infamous Trump University, and many more.

As we write about in our best-selling new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments — the first assessment of the arc of Trump’s career by leadership scholars — his grandiose image building is a key leadership lever of the supposed master of the deal. Published by Worth/Simon & Schuster, our book makes clear how the outer-borough arriviste from Queens was never truly accepted by the Manhattan aristocracy, so he reacted by plastering his name all over New York City in giant letters, putting gold leaf where others would put wood or stone, creating a visual vocabulary of success that regular people could easily and immediately understand. He is obsessed with gold, because gold screams money to the masses. This has always been his entire shtick: class for the masses. He democratizes the performance of luxury in a comically over-the-top, exaggeratedly accessible way. He offers middle-class tourists the chance to walk through Trump Tower’s golden atrium, to bask in a glow that feels like royalty.

This splashy indulgence was labeled a century ago as “conspicuous consumption” by the economist Thorstein Veblen, who believed the average American had a desire to emulate such garish symbols of success. Such an ostentatious show of wealth may prompt some to imagine admiringly, “That’s how I would live if I made $1 billion overnight.”

And more than 20 years ago, when NBC invited one of us to review the first season of The Apprentice, the result was a Wall Street Journal column titled “The Last Emperor Trump.” It infuriated Trump, drawing a parallel between the Roman crowds who once packed into the Colosseum to cheer on gladiators and see the emperor vote on the fate of the loser, and the latter-day TV viewers huddled by their screens to see how Trump, with his imperial aura, decreed the fate of contestants. This brutal method of leadership selection rewarded the most gladiatorial aspirants who survived by destroying their own teammates — odd in the context of leadership since it left no team in place for the winner to lead.

No successful emperor in history has engaged in Trumpian levels of relentless personal branding. Julius Caesar did not stamp his name on every aqueduct. Even Alexander the Great, who named Alexandria after himself, showed relative restraint compared to what we are seeing now. Historically, the leaders who obsess over ornamental personal monuments tend to be those with more divisive legacies.

This grasping for grandeur is far more than mere commercial branding or entrepreneurial greed as Trump exploits the trappings of office. Such desperate attempts at grandiosity evoke empty vanity, clutching at physical monuments to prove a greatness that history has not yet conferred.

For patrician statesmen, grandeur is usually understated, radiating restraint rather than gawk-inspiring shows of brazen wealth. It is ironic that Trump regularly compares himself to Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — both renowned for their legendary humility. Biographers Ron Chernow, Joseph Ellis, and Garry Wills have documented Washington’s reluctance to assume command of the Continental Army in 1775, feeling he was not up to the job, and his determination to limit his term of office, not wanting to resemble a king despite his popularity. Similarly, Carl Sandburg, David Herbert Donald, and Doris Kearns Goodwin have depicted a Lincoln marked by humble, self-deprecating self-awareness.

By contrast, Trump is a grotesque extension of what Arthur Schlesinger described as “The Imperial Presidency” — a concept Schlesinger applied critically to the Nixon era, though FDR and Ronald Reagan were masters of majestic ceremony, mythmaking, and monumental landmarks.

This obsession carries into the White House, literally and physically. Trump redecorated the Executive Mansion in a more gilded style, with gold ornament across the Oval Office, and undertook renovations to the East Wing to construct a new, gold-laced grand ballroom. For Trump, a building is a physical manifestation and expression of his heroic drive, of the image he wishes to present to the world. That is the same motivation driving the proposed “Arc de Trump,” with Trump hoping to construct a new monument in Washington that echoes the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Of course, the other side of Trump’s obsession with grandiosity is an inevitable fragility beneath all the glitz and glamour. Gold plating, after all, is only a thin veneer. Inflated numbers are easily punctured by reality. Because grandeur depends on constant reinforcement, every contradiction becomes a threat. A leader who sees cracks as existential cannot tolerate dissent. Preserving that fragile illusion of greatness, no matter what cost, becomes the only real, overarching leadership priority.

Trump implicitly understands that chutzpah is necessary to transcend ordinary constraints and achieve heroic, even mythic stature. He is constantly inventing and perpetuating his own heroic myth, acting as his own best salesman. Decades ago, psychologists Otto Rank and Ernest Becker suggested that a mythic aura of a manufactured heroic identity is fed by a leader’s presumption that it will satisfy some kind of quest, with a larger-than-life image granting both magical powers of persuasion and the hopes of immortality.

Alas, Trump’s desired destiny will not be realized. The futility of leaders arrogantly seeking fame in a quest for immortal renown was warned about in the 1818 sonnet “Ozymandias” by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, invoking the Greek name for Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.

I met a traveller from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. 
Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 
No thing beside remains. 
Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

For all his sneering arrogance and trappings of conceit, that once-almighty but long-forgotten pharaoh was unprotected from the ravages of the sands of time. The cold indifference of history buried that grandiose tyrant in the oblivion of the desert — a haunting reminder that even the most grandiose of leaders are but fleeting shadows in the long arc of history. Not that Trump loses any sleep over such lessons.

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