The Monument is the Method

The greatest monument to a norm-breaking president is the one he erects to himself. A testament to rule-breaking that defies the tradition against self-monumentalization. The monument is the method.

President Trump has put his name on battleships, buildings, and proposed a ceremonial arch and coinage. Presidents don’t do this¹, but President Trump does. (That sentence could be the inscription on one of the monuments)

Peter Baker’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times catalogs Trump’s self-mythologizing: Superman, Jedi knight, military hero, even pope in white cassock.² This self-flattery exceeds norm-breaking or stylistic excess. The persistent Great Ruler mindset reveals a danger that an entire form of government was created to avoid.

The framers described power as “a cancer,” and an “ocean.” They believed it possessed an “endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries,” as Bernard Bailyn describes it in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Men withered under power’s sway. Patrick Henry warned, “If your American chief be a man of ambition, and abilities, how easy it is for him to render himself absolute.” Samuel Adams argued that power defied human restraint: “Such is the depravity of mankind that ambition and lust of power above the law are predominant passions in the breasts of most men.”

A chief executive who envisions himself as grandly as President Trump does exhibits the self-regard the framers feared most. This leads, they believed, to a president who privileges loyalty and whims above duties to the country and the people. The psychology of such rulers convinces both themselves and their followers that to please the ruler is to please the state.

Mix in the tribal benefits of political parties and, as George Washington wrote upon leaving office, “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

These aren’t old ideas. Real-time idolatry challenges how government functions. When the leader poses as infallible—”saved by God,” never tired, never sick—criticism becomes not just wrong but illegitimate, even treasonous. This breeds a market for favor where those seeking power privilege loyalty above all else. Lawmakers who serve the cult of personality prioritize keeping in the leader’s good graces over representing constituent concerns. The transmission mechanism of democratic accountability—public opinion flowing through elected representatives—gets clogged when those representatives answer first to the leader’s ego.

Those monuments pitched by others show how this flattery market works. The Kennedy Center committee, hand-picked by Trump, suggested adding his name to the building named for a martyred president. That aides and flatterers compete to earn his favor through personality tributes memorializes the central role personal stroking plays in his presidency.

When the subject commissions his own monument, the sculptor admits no impediments. The leader worthy of a monument cannot be wrong, so facts must bend. This builds a permission structure for increasingly absurd claims-- at odds, for example, with what people can see with their own eyes-- where admitting the president’s failure or error becomes existential.

Yes, previous presidents harbored egos. You cannot be effective in the job without a strong sense of self.

Lincoln polled his seven cabinet members on a policy he was determined to pursue. He went around the table, and one by one, each secretary—Seward, Chase, Stanton, and the rest—voted “No.” Lincoln then raised his own hand and said: “Seven nays and one aye. The ayes have it.”³

The relevant comparison isn’t between vain presidents and modest ones, but between presidents who—whatever their personal vanity—accepted institutional constraints on self-aggrandizement and a president who explicitly rejects those constraints. The proposed “Independence Arch”—slated to stand 250 feet tall, dwarfing the nearby Lincoln Memorial—represents this rejection in stone. Humility in previous presidents wasn’t an elemental safeguard against overreach—it was a symptom of their underlying commitment to republican government.

Cato the Elder said ‘I would much rather have people ask why I don’t have a monument than why I do.’ Trump’s self-erected monuments force no such question—they leave the people out entirely. That inverts the American way, where the people or their representatives bestow honor. Trump’s monuments demand attention rather than earn it. The president’s approval rating stands at 36 in the latest, February 2026 AP-NORC poll-- meaning these monuments don’t reflect popular judgment but defy it. For them to become legitimate testaments rather than exercises in self-aggrandizement, the people would need to improve their verdict. Until then, these monuments herald a presidency where the safeguards against authoritarian impulse have fallen.

1. But the Hoover Dam! Herbert Hoover is a useful exception here, but not in the way Trump is. In 1929, when Senator Lawrence Phipps of Colorado proposed naming the Boulder Canyon project for him, Hoover told Phipps he did not favor having the dam bear his name, a stance reported at the time in the New York Times (“Against ‘Hoover Dam’ Plan; President Opposes Naming the Boulder Project for Him,” May 10, 1929). The eventual “Hoover Dam” label was first bestowed by Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur, not at Hoover’s own request, and the name was later stripped by the Roosevelt administration and then restored by Congress in 1947, underscoring how the fight over the dam’s name was driven by Hoover’s allies and opponents rather than by Hoover himself.

2. Thank you Peter for prompting this thinking.

3. There is some debate about which exact moment this was. It is claimed by some to have been a vote about the Emancipation Proclamation.