In 1990, Playboy published an interview with Donald Trump in which the future president offered his thoughts on foreign affairs, the death penalty, and why he puts his name on everything. He also reflected on the meaning — or, perhaps, meaninglessness — of life. “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it is all a rather sad situation,” he said. “We’re here and we live our 60, 70, or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”
It’s no secret that every president cares about how they’ll be remembered. But that pithy, 35-year-old quote explains a whole lot about Trump, his rise to power, and how he governs today. He doesn’t only want a legacy, be it good or bad. Even winning the presidency twice doesn’t suffice. What Trump really wants is to — in some way or another — live forever, and he’s only just getting started.
By now, Trump’s imprint on the world is indelible. His ability to wiggle out of legal consequences for his corruption and lawlessness has ushered in a new era of presidential immunity. His inability to admit defeat in 2020 nearly resulted in a coup d’etat and seriously undermined voters’ faith in American elections. And his harsh immigration crackdowns, his fixation on birthright citizenship, and his censorship of speech have challenged the very ideals of what it means to be an American.
But to fully understand Trump’s broader political project and how he has successfully transformed America, you have to recognize that he isn’t only a political figure, but something much bigger: a cultural icon in the crudest sense.
It’s that side of Trump that begins to explain one of the weirdest aspects of his presidency: his focus on aesthetics and how aggressively he is forcing his particular style and taste onto America. Whether it’s making the White House look more like his private residences or turning the arts into his own pet project, Trump is trying to fundamentally change how America’s government is perceived. Put another way, when we look at the government’s buildings and institutions, Trump wants us to see only him — even after he’s gone.
It’s not entirely accurate to say that Trump has always sought fame. Because what Trump has really been chasing his entire adult life has been omnipresence. Celebrity status, untold fortune, and television success were never going to be enough; he wants to be everywhere. For a big chunk of his New York business years, Trump was completely obsessed with the idea of having the biggest and tallest buildings in the world. He injected himself into the American zeitgeist decades ago, giving tabloids enough gossip to fill their pages with scandal after scandal since the 1970s. His real estate career, his offensively lavish lifestyle, and his eventual rise as a reality TV star made him, in many ways, a caricature of American capitalism’s excesses.
That never-ending pursuit of omnipresence has shaped Trump’s political career and presidencies, perhaps more than anything else. After all, from a political standpoint, Trump has been all over the place: He has been a Democrat, independent, and a Republican. He sought to befriend Hillary Clinton — donating to her Senate campaigns and the Clinton Foundation — before eventually running against her in 2016. And while there are some policies and ideas that Trump has long been committed to, like tariffs or racist conspiracy theories, he has always been more devoted to himself than any policy agenda.
His true desire, it seems, wasn’t to simply become the president of the United States, but to become the single most enduring representation of America itself.
Trump’s political project, in other words, is to rebrand America. He’s seemingly not so desperate to eke out wins for the Republican Party so much as he is trying to remake America in his own image. Gone are the days where America is promoted as an idea — a nation of immigrants or an unfinished project that every generation of Americans strives to improve — because in his eyes, America is Trump.
The roots of Trump’s aesthetic
To understand Trump’s aesthetics, you have to go back to the 1980s lifestyles of the rich and famous in New York, the time and place that defined Trump’s rise in American culture. A lot of what Trump values today — real estate, television ratings, Time magazine covers — can be traced back to that era, when all of those things, at least to Trump and those running in his circles, were markers of clout.
That period was defined by greed and ostentatious displays of wealth. And Trump relished that environment. In the Playboy interview, Trump was specifically asked about why he feels so comfortable showing off his riches, especially given how much poverty could be seen on the streets. “There has always been a display of wealth and always will be,” he said. “And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life. Dynasty did it on TV. It’s very important that people aspire to be successful. The only way you can do it is if you look at somebody who is.”
Trump’s quest to own the famed Plaza Hotel in New York City, which he bought for $400 million in 1988, ended in spectacular failure, with the hotel filing for bankruptcy just a few years after the purchase. But for Trump, acquiring the Plaza Hotel wasn’t merely about making money; it was about achieving status. “To me the Plaza was like a great painting,” he said, recalling the whole ordeal in an interview in 2015. “It wasn’t purely about the bottom line. I have many assets like that and the end result is that they are always much more valuable than what you paid for them.”
Just like that venture, Trump’s vision for America today is remarkably shallow. It doesn’t matter how functional America’s institutions or even economy actually are. The only thing that matters is what America looks like on the outside. And a shiny veneer that flaunts wealth and military might — be it through a gilded White House or a B-2 stealth bomber flyover — is perfectly adequate, even if it’s entirely hollow or bankrupt on the inside.
So naturally, Trump has dedicated a decent chunk of his presidency to imposing his style and aesthetic onto America.
In both terms, he has issued executive orders to change the look of federal buildings, discarding new architectural styles and instead promoting grand neoclassical buildings that mimic ancient empires. He has been in a long-simmering feud with Boeing since his first term over the new Air Force One — the iconic aircraft that carries the president across the country and around the world — and has been deeply involved in the design of the plane, which looks suspiciously similar to his own private jet. And he has completely redecorated the White House, decking out the Oval Office in gold, turning the Rose Garden into a patio that resembles his Mar-a-Lago club, and announcing plans to build a $200 million ballroom extension to the East Wing.
But Trump’s fixation on rebranding America’s image goes deeper than giving the Office of the President a makeover. Upon returning to the White House earlier this year, Trump purged the board of the Kennedy Center and appointed a new board that elected him to be the chair — an unusual role for the president of the United States to take on. The move showed how invested Trump personally is in the culture wars, so much so that he wants to be directly involved in decisions about what kind of art Americans should enjoy.
Trump is now even planning on hosting the Kennedy Center Honors this year, saying he was “very involved” in selecting the honorees. He also said that he vetoed “a couple of wokesters” who were in the running. And, according to the New York Times, Trump has considered giving posthumous awards to Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley, and Babe Ruth.
He is also targeting the nation’s museums and historical displays in an attempt to recast America’s history in a much more favorable light that sweeps all the bad parts under the rug. For instance, he issued an executive order that discourages the Smithsonian Institution from putting up displays that portray America and its past negatively. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump said in a recent social media post. “We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
To be sure, the United States has always been deeply invested in how it is perceived, both domestically and abroad, and has always projected itself as the “shining city upon a hill,” as Ronald Reagan often liked to say. And while there’s no shortage of big egos among presidents, they often, at the very least, tried to gesture that America was bigger than just them.
What is different about Trump is that he is not so interested in the idealistic vision of America — or in presenting America as an idea, a neverending endeavor of creating a more perfect union. He’s only interested in grandeur and the authoritarian tendency to so thoroughly intertwine himself with his country that the two can’t be separated. And whether it’s the Oval Office redesign, the Kennedy Center takeover, or — in quintessential dictatorship fashion — banners of Trump’s portrait cropping up around the nation’s capital, the message Trump is sending is clear: We are changing how America is perceived, we will aggressively flaunt our power and wealth, and we will iconize Trump so that he becomes just as much of a symbol of the United States as its own flag.
The sinister motives behind this rebrand
On the one hand, Trump’s fixation on aesthetics can seem inconsequential — moves that can be easily undone by a future administration. On the other hand, they’re a window into Trump’s broader political project. After all, the way Trump is imposing his style and taste onto the American public is a projection of his ideals, and an attempt to change not just America’s politics but its culture, too.
There are two major components of Trump’s attempt to rebrand America. The first is to establish new American norms — changing the perception of what the average American way of life looks like.
Take Trump’s desire to reinforce gender norms and project a certain type of hypermasculinity, all of which permeate his entire aesthetic. Some parts are less subtle than others: Kicking off his Kennedy Center takeover, for example, Trump announced on social media in February that he would “immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” That vision, apparently, had a lot to do with drag shows. “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” the president wrote. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST,” he added in another post.
Trump also likes to promote traditional images of strength as a representation of both himself and America. His now-famous photo after he was almost assassinated last year — with his fist pumped in the air and blood dripping down his face as he yelled, “Fight, fight, fight” — was turned into a painting that replaced a portrait of Barack Obama in Trump’s White House. And his social media channels often promote photoshopped images of Trump as a superhero or with a muscular build.
The Department of Homeland Security in particular has been fond of sharing nostalgic paintings — like John Gast’s “American Progress,” representing the imperialist manifest destiny doctrine, or Thomas Kinkade’s “Morning Pledge,” depicting American schoolchildren gathered around the US flag in an idyllic suburb — with not-so-subtle captions like “Protect the Homeland” or “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” (In a recruitment ad for Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), DHS also posted on X, “Defend your culture!”)
All of this imagery, from the gaudy Oval Office overhaul to the kitsch paintings being shared on social media, tries to hark back to an old-fashioned idea of what America is supposed to look like. What Trump is really selling is the notion that the America that elected Barack Obama — the multiracial and cross-class coalition that formed a decisive majority in 2008 and 2012 — never really existed. And there seems to be an everlasting nostalgia for a whiter America in Trump’s White House, even in rhetoric articulated by top officials like Stephen Miller. “Why is it that Democrats are so insistent that unlimited numbers of illegals from countries that are incapable of managing their own affairs come here?” Miller said earlier this summer. “Countries like Somalia, countries like Haiti, countries that have no history of successful self-government, and they want unlimited numbers of illegals from those countries and refugees from those countries to come here.”
Ultimately, this is all reflected in Trump’s policy agenda. His mass deportation campaign, his executive order on birthright citizenship, and his attack on fundamental rights of immigrants, including free speech, underscore how one of his principal goals as president is to redefine what it really means to be American.
This is the kind of America that, as noted above, Miller and DHS are trying to promote. It’s also the America that Trump feels comfortable being associated with. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who, along with his father, was sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for keeping Black tenants out of their buildings.
How Trump’s rebrand reinforces individualistic tropes
The second and final component of the rebrand is for Trump to personally embody that America — to transform himself into the ultimate figure to aspire to. And that part has to do with reviving the old American ideal of individualism and self-reliance, the false notion that the most successful Americans are somehow self-made, and that there is no collective ideal worth pursuing more than one’s own individual success. Trump’s whole aesthetic, and the way he’s specifically projecting his style onto American government, is a celebration of that philosophy. It’s all an ode to himself, not the American people or the generations before him that made his own fortunes possible in the first place.
That individualistic philosophy is why Trump is so invested in remodeling the White House, the Kennedy Center, and even museums in his own style — to exhibit his image as the greatest marker of success. It’s why, on the right, there’s such an overwhelming cult following around a single individual. There’s an obsession with personifying America, and Trump desperately wants to be that personification.
The America Trump wants to project, in other words, is not the Statue of Liberty welcoming “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” or a country of shared collective interests, but one that adheres to the concept of the survival of the fittest. And Trump seems to believe — or at the very least wants to convey — that he’s the fittest of us all.
Much of what has informed Trump’s whole philosophy is his simplistic idea of success: that his many failures aren’t necessarily a reflection on him, but that his success and wealth were achieved solely because of him. So the aesthetic Trump is trying his very best to push onto Americans — displays of sheer rugged strength, of vast wealth, of supposed success — points to a picture of an individualistic society that doesn’t really care about its past sins. Because in Trump’s world, so long as you amass an enormous amount of wealth and power (as both he and America have), then it’s all worth showing off.
It’s like he told Playboy back in 1990: “Let me tell you, a display is a good thing…It’s very important that people aspire to be successful. The only way you can do it is if you look at somebody who is.”
That’s why Trump doesn’t just want to be a political or historical figure, but a cultural icon that can represent American greatness long after he’s gone. He wants the whole world to forever look at him.
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