Republics rarely collapse with a bang. They usually sag - first in manners, then in taste. Washington, once a city of austere façades concealing venality, has lately embraced a more candid vulgarity involving President Trump.
Federal buildings like the Departments of Agriculture are festooned with banners bearing his portrait. The Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace have been at least partially named after him. A football stadium, National Park Service passes, a commemorative coin for the nation's 250th birthday - all have been publicly imagined as vehicles for his likeness.
Some of this has remained mercifully unrealized. The impulse is the point. Each gesture, taken alone, looks like mere theater. Washington has always been fond of costumes. But taken together, they suggest a deeper confusion: the idea that the state exists to flatter a single man, and that national symbolism is simply another branding opportunity.
History, which has seen this show before, records that such confusions are rarely accidental.
Saparmurat Niyazov, the post-Soviet ruler of Turkmenistan from 1991 until 2006, offers a useful study in excess. Having renamed himself "Turkmenba?y" (Father of the Turkmen), he governed a poor, gas-rich country with no effective opposition and an unlimited appetite for homage.
Cities, airports, and months of the year bore his name or that of his relatives. Schoolchildren memorized his "Ruhnama," a spiritual-political ramble elevated to sacred text. In the capital, he erected his masterpiece: a monumental gold statue of himself, engineered to rotate so that his image forever faced the sun. It was tyranny as solar system.
Niyazov's significance lies less in the scale of the absurdity than in its purpose. The cult did not bubble up from popular devotion; it was imposed, relentlessly, from above.
Institutions were stripped of independent meaning and reoriented toward a single biography. History became prologue. Gold became argument.
Trump's America is richer, noisier, and infinitely more resistant to such total choreography. The constitutional machinery grinds on. Courts rule. Elections intrude.
Yet within these limits, Trump has displayed a persistent fascination with how far the symbols of the republic can be bent without snapping.
Laws are tedious. Structures resist. Symbols, however, are obliging. They can be renamed, replated, repurposed. A banner is cheaper than legislation. Gilding is quicker than legitimacy.
The emphasis, accordingly, has fallen on spectacle: names, de'cor, commemorations, the aggressive insertion of self into spaces meant to honor something larger and older.
It is personalization without responsibility, grandeur without inheritance. The aesthetic is not imperial so much as nouveau riche: history treated as a backdrop for a photo op, institutions as accessories.
Americans like to believe they are immune to the follies they mock abroad.
Golden statues are someone else's problem. Personality cults belong to backward places with unpronounceable capitals. Yet democracies do not need to be overthrown to be cheapened.
They can be worn down by repetition, by the steady normalization of bad taste elevated to principle.
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