Trump's Relentless Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/us/politics/trumps-american-cult-of-personality.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MVA.hv0X.1c1bfLqb7FYP&smid=url-share

Trump’s Relentless Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality

President Trump has engaged in a spree of self-aggrandizement unlike any of his predecessors, fostering a mythologized superhuman persona and making himself the inescapable force at home and around the world.


The racist online video that President Trump recently shared and then deleted generated a bipartisan furor because of its portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. What was little remarked on was how it presented Mr. Trump himself — as the “King of the Jungle.”

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 king, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.

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His White House is pressuring the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery to display portraits of Mr. Trump by his supporters. A group of cryptocurrency investors has shelled out $300,000 to forge a 15-foot-tall gold-covered bronze statue of Mr. Trump called “Don Colossus” to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla.

His administration is considering designating a new class of battleships in Mr. Trump’s name. His allies are pressuring foreign leaders to endorse his bid for the Nobel Peace Prize and threatening consequences for resisting. Some supporters in Congress have even proposed adding his face to Mount Rushmore, an effort that, for the moment, has gained little traction.

This spree of self-aggrandizement goes beyond mere vanity, although Mr. Trump suffers from no particular shortage in that department. “I really have a big ego,” he noted at the National Prayer Breakfast this month, an assessment that drew no disagreement. What Mr. Trump is actually doing, though, is making himself the inescapable force in American life.