Within just the past week, two of Donald Trump’s most fundamental priorities have shared the spotlight. The first is his white nationalism, or more precisely, his white global nationalism, embodied in his National Security Strategy document, which effectively demanded that Europe cease all in-migration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, lest its white Christian majorities become minorities. To that end, the document called on those nations to back such white nationalist parties as the AfD in Germany and Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the U.K. This ongoing diversification of Europe—not the rise of autocratic China and the aggression of autocratic Russia—was the main threat to white American hegemony, according to our official strategy. And just in case this bureaucratic formulation of racism and Islamophobia didn’t register sufficiently with casual news followers, Trump also labeled Somali Americans as “garbage.”
The other Trump priority that loomed large was his self-aggrandizement, which, to be sure, is his lifeblood, but which took new forms in his hosting of the Kennedy Center Honors and his hiring a new architect for his ever-expanding White House ballroom, which at its current rate of growth will soon spill over to the National Mall if not the Potomac. Alongside the minting of 250th anniversary dollars with Trump’s face on both sides, and the construction of the Arc de Trump on the Virginia end of the Memorial Bridge, Trump’s determination to have the nation memorialize him even as his approval rating dips below 40 percent reveals a clear case of megalomania.
But what really set Trumpologists abuzz in the past few days was one policy shift that managed to encompass both his racism and his megalomania. This was the decision of Trump’s National Park Service to eliminate two holidays—Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth—from the list of days when admission to the parks is free, and substitute for them … Trump’s birthday.
If that’s not a two-fer, I don’t know what is.
Trump is not Hitler, not even close, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t suffer from some of Hitler’s own derangements, including both race hatred and megalomania’s delusions of grandeur. By running through a parade of architects until he could find one willing to build him a ballroom in the style of the Acropolis and the dimensions of the pyramids, Trump seeks the kind of vast, neo-imperial Roman designs that Hitler sought from Albert Speer. By pressing his face on our currency, he is aping the self-aggrandizements of Roman emperors, which was often a sign of those emperors’ derangement.
Would that were the sole imperial derangement that Trump is recreating. Caligula famously appointed his horse as his consul. Trump appointed Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense. Though it lacks an American (much less a constitutional) precedent, the imperial past isn’t past, so long as Trump is president.