During his second presidency, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have made a concerted effort to place his image and his name in as many places as possible — from renaming the Kennedy Center to Trump memecoins to renaming Palm Beach, Florida’s airport the President Donald J. Trump International Airport. But not everyone on the right has a favorable view of Trump’s nonstop self-promotion. In a scathing editorial, the conservative National Review argues that a “tacky” new Trump dollar coin is wildly incompatible with U.S. norms and traditions.
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“Citing language in the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, the Trump administration has issued a new one-dollar coin featuring the president’s scowling face,” the National Review editorial board writes. “While, technically, the coin is a collectible, the administration has been keen to insist nevertheless that they ‘may be still used as legal tender.’ Which is to say that the president of the United States has found a legal loophole that, in a departure from two centuries of tradition, has allowed him to put his own likeness on the money. Is this draining the swamp?”
The conservative National Review writers stress that the U.S. “has a long history of declining to put living people on its currency,” going back to its first president George Washington — who learned that the U.S. Mint “intended to add his face to the money” and “condemned the idea as unrepublican.”
“In 1866,” according to the Review, “Congress formalized Washington’s instinct with the passage of a law that barred the ‘portrait or likeness’ of any living figure from being featured on paper notes. Since then, this norm has held, with one narrow exception: commemorative coins. Care to guess whether President Trump is more interested in the norm or the exception?”
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The Review editorial writers warn that the “national custom” Trump “has broken here is a valuable one.”
“The United States is neither a monarchy, in which it is customary for the king’s face to adorn the money, nor a dictatorship, in which it is customary for the dictator’s face to adorn everything,” the Review emphasizes. “On its own, this infraction will not bring down the republic. But republicanism is a habit, and habits require constant reinforcement. America has become what it is today thanks to a patchwork quilt of customs, manners, modes, and routines. Nobody asked President Trump for this violation of those routines. Nobody will thank him for it, either.”
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