President Trump set the Beltway buzzing again this week after draping the Department of Labor building in a monumental banner promoting — himself. Trump’s scowling visage now hangs three stories tall above a caption touting “AMERICAN WORKERS FIRST.”
The banner joins a similar one at the USDA and his recent takeovers of cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution as the most visible efforts yet to make Trump’s name and image indistinguishable from the idea of the U.S. government itself. For millions of MAGA voters, Trump has become the physical embodiment of American renewal. And what’s wrong with a little hero worship, after all?
Trump’s allies argue that the cultural backlash to rebranding Washington in his image is nothing more than leftist Trump Derangement Syndrome. Experts on authoritarianism compare it to the visual propaganda of strongmen like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s deified leader Kim Il Sung. What you see in Trump’s cultural Rorschach test says a lot about the kind of country you think America should become.
None of this should be surprising to Americans who have watched the Republican Party reshape itself entirely in Trump’s image, most notably by elevating presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the role of RNC co-chair. Meanwhile, Trump has appointed more close family members to government roles than any president in history, effectively turning the executive branch into a family business that would be immediately recognizable to Augustus Caesar and his Julio-Claudian kin.
Democrats have condemned Trump’s immense nepotism as a cynical moneymaking scheme, and they aren’t wrong: The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s crypto schemes alone have netted his close family members hundreds of millions of dollars. But making easy money is just one of Trump’s motivations. He also understands that blood-and-soil nativism requires an ideal “public family” to serve as a social example. To the MAGA faithful, no family better exemplifies a restored, de-woke-ified America than the Trumps.
Fascist ideology treats nepotism not as a bug but as a feature. Glorifying the ideal family was a core part of Adolf Hitler’s social propaganda, both because it raised the ruling leadership above criticism and because it allowed the Nazis to lay claim to an idealized, pure past.
You don’t need to look far to see that imagined past in Trump’s government, where the Department of Homeland Security routinely posts memes urging readers to “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” and “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” In July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched its “Defend the Homeland” marketing campaign, an ad blitz meant to tug at nativist heartstrings by using nearly the exact same language as prewar Germany’s “Protect Your Homeland” campaign.
Those posts are often bracketed by content citing Bible verses popular with Christian nationalist and nativist groups, according to analysis conducted by independent news outlet Forward, as well as AI-generated images portraying Trump as the macho protector of America’s cultural purity. The American people are being subjected to a kind of fascist Ludovico Technique, bombarded with imagery meant to replace our actual historical and cultural memory with one in which Trump and MAGA ideology have always been the centerpoint. It was only a matter of time before Republicans started draping their propaganda on public buildings at monumental scale.
It’s also no mistake that Trump’s banners position his scowling image next to Abraham Lincoln at USDA and Theodore Roosevelt at the Department of Labor. Fascist movements gain legitimacy by linking their radical upheavals to respected historical figures, effectively reframing their sweeping reforms as a return to older traditions.
That’s true even when the actual policies are completely opposite, like Trump celebrating putting “American Workers First” while slashing funding and employment at the Department of Labor. It’s also why you aren’t likely to see a towering Trump-Jimmy Carter banner adorning the Department of Education, and why Trump’s team chose Roosevelt instead of William Howard Taft, who actually created the Department of Education. Propaganda isn’t about getting the details right; it’s about creating an emotional response, and that means painting in broad and often inaccurate strokes.
The American people used to have a cultural aversion to glorifying sitting presidents in triumphal banners. It’s one reason we don’t allow living people to appear on our money — the very idea offends our sense that public servants are and should be regular people. Tinpot dictators need to fly banners because their rule is illegitimate. America, we’ve always believed, was different — better — than that.
For 250 years, victory in our democratic process was legitimacy enough for a president. They didn’t require military parades and gargantuan banners to reaffirm their glory or the righteousness of their cause. Trump is different. His need for validation is leading our nation down the dark path of strongman autocracy from which few countries have returned.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
