The Patriot Post® · Heads Trump. Tails Trump.

The Treasury Department has announced that to mark the nation’s 250th birthday next year, it plans to issue a new $1 coin bearing the likeness of President Trump on both sides. According to design drafts released by US Treasurer Brandon Beach, the front of the coin will depict Trump in profile, above the words “In God We Trust” and the dates 1776–2026. On the reverse, beneath the words “FIGHT-FIGHT-FIGHT,” the administration proposes to feature an image based on the photo of Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air after the 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.

“On this momentous anniversary,” the Treasury posted on X, “there is no profile more emblematic for the front of this coin than that of our serving President, Donald J. Trump.”

Even for a White House that revels in its disdain for bipartisan political norms, the idea of putting the incumbent president’s face on US currency is jolting.

A few days before its coin announcement, the administration disclosed deals with Pfizer and AstraZeneca to sell their drugs directly to consumers at discounted prices through a new government operation called TrumpRx. The venture is scheduled to begin operating in 2026, but a trumprx.gov website is already live. The site is topped by a full-screen portrait of the president, a large campaign-style logo at the bottom, and a notice labeling it “an official website of the United States government.” It does not mention that no previous administration, Republican or Democratic, has ever formally attached the sitting president’s name to a government initiative or website.

These back-to-back announcements aren’t unrelated. Both reflect an inexhaustible impulse that has animated Trump throughout his career: an obsessive need to stamp his name, image, and ego on every enterprise he touches. It is perfectly in character that the man who christened everything from hotels to golf courses to sneakers to cologne with the name “Trump” is now engraving it onto pieces of the government itself — TrumpRx and a $1 coin today, and who knows what else tomorrow? It would never have occurred to most presidents to treat the federal government as one more personal branding opportunity. But Trump isn’t most presidents.

In the private sector, such relentless self-promotion could be dismissed as simply the vanity of a vulgarian. In the public sector, it is something more corrosive: the personalization of government authority.

A president who cannot distinguish between personal renown and constitutional responsibility has ample opportunity to turn symbols of national unity into props for self-worship. When the state itself becomes a billboard for the executive’s name and public institutions are turned into extensions of a single man’s vanity, government of the people grows hollow and citizenship is replaced with veneration.

The birth of the American republic was a repudiation of the idea that a nation and its ruler were one and the same. From the beginning, the United States resisted the Old World norm of chiseling a sovereign’s likeness into its money. Elsewhere, kings and Caesars might mint coins bearing their own image, but currency in America was engraved with eagles and allegories of liberty. The message was deliberate: The nation’s identity was not embodied in its incumbent leaders, but in its permanent ideals.

George Washington set the pattern. When Congress proposed that the first president be addressed with a royalist honorific — suggestions included “His Elective Majesty” and “His Mightiness” — he spiked the notion. He knew that trappings of kingship had no place here.

Indeed, Washington’s face didn’t appear on a circulating coin until 1932. By then, the taboo against depicting living presidents had become a civic reflex. Trump’s insistence on branding currency and federal programs with his own name and image flouts that elemental American value. The Founding Fathers recoiled from the concentration of power in one individual. Trump not only celebrates it, he markets it.

The most admirable presidents have always esteemed humility. Abraham Lincoln, though a brilliant political strategist, was no egomaniac. Rather than banish his most powerful critics, he appointed them to his Cabinet. When Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, he kept a plaque with his credo on his desk: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Conservatives used to mock the vanity of politicians who named every bridge, courthouse, and rest area after themselves. The late Senator Robert Byrd — who ensured that his native West Virginia was dotted with Byrd highways, Byrd schools, Byrd health centers, and Byrd dams — was one popular target for Republicans decrying political narcissism indulged at taxpayer expense. One thing I admired about Mitt Romney was his aversion to such self-idolatry: As governor of Massachusetts, he ended the practice of putting the governor’s name on highway signs welcoming drivers to the Bay State.

As with so much else, however, Republicans in the MAGA era now embrace what they used to condemn. Naming things for the sitting president? Many on the right have put forward Trump naming schemes that go well beyond a $1 coin and a federal website.

To be fair, there is one faint historical precedent. In 1926, the Treasury issued a commemorative silver half-dollar for the nation’s 150th birthday featuring George Washington’s profile alongside that of the sitting president, Calvin Coolidge. But the resemblance ends there. The coins, which were struck at the Philadelphia Mint under special congressional authorization, were not intended as circulating currency. They were sold as collectibles through the Sesquicentennial Exposition Commission to help fund the celebration. But they sold very poorly. More than 85 percent of the 1 million half-dollars produced were returned to the Mint and melted — a testament to the public’s discomfort with the idea.

Coolidge himself was famously modest — his taciturn demeanor earned him the nickname “Silent Cal” — and there is no record that he sought or approved the design of the coin. By contrast, the proposed 2026 dollar, with its “Fight” slogan and pose of defiance, seems plainly intended to glorify Trump. And while the 1926 coin was expressly authorized by Congress, what the Trump administration has drafted appears to be illegal under Title 31 of the US Code, which prohibits issuing any coin to honor a president who is still living.

That proscription is not merely an aesthetic nicety. It embodies a key constitutional value: Government belongs to the people, not to the person who currently happens to lead it. A nation that confuses the two forgets what made it free.