A 3,000-word “news analysis” by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker on Trump’s supposed cult of personality was headlined cheekily: “A Superman, Jedi and Pope -- Trump’s Relentless Bid to Mythologize Himself.”
The online version was more insulting: “Trump’s Relentless Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality-- President Trump has engaged in a spree of self-aggrandizement unlike any of his predecessors, fostering a mythologized superhuman persona and making himself the inescapable force at home and around the world.”
The story included a photo of a gold-leaf copper statue of Trump, tilted on its side -- a statute paid for by outside private sources selling crypto coins.
After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a king, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.
While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman and omnipresent persona leading to idolatry.
....
His White House is pressuring the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery to display portraits of Mr. Trump by his supporters. A group of cryptocurrency investors has shelled out $300,000 to forge a 15-foot-tall gold-covered bronze statue of Mr. Trump called “Don Colossus” to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla.
For the record, late Minneapolis resident George Floyd had three memorial services while residing in a 14-karat gold-plated coffin, but no one would dare insinuate that Floyd's supporters were a “cult of personality.”
As for fellow presidents, it would be hard to top Barack Obama hero worship from the entertainment community, like Black Eyed Peas musician will.i.am’s infamous celebrity video for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, “Yes We Can,” which the Times greeted favorably. The Obama worship often spread to the elitist media itself. It began with a Washington Post front-page story gawking at his “chiseled pectorals” and ended with Times columnist Frank Bruni gushing "We’re going to miss this man, America. Whatever his flaws, he’s been more than our president. Time and again, he’s been our national poet.”
Baker himself wrote a gushy Obama tribute book complete with color photographs titled Obama: The Call to History. Amazon includes this sugary blurb:
"Very likely not since tributes to the assassinated John F. Kennedy
will a book of photographs of a president so recently departed make
millions of Americans want to cry."―James Goodman, The New York Times Book Review
But that’s all in the dustbin of history; Obama’s only mention in this long Baker piece is as the racial victim of a clip reposted by Trump. Baker mentions several other U.S. presidents to put up against Trump, who comes out as by far the most cultish American leader, approaching Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung territory.
Cults of personality are traditionally associated with dictators and demagogues, not democrats. They are figures like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini and more recently the shirtless, horseback-riding Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But Mr. Trump does not seem concerned that he might be heading down a dangerous path.
Baker did some cherry-picking to establish a pattern of commentators and Democratic politicians accusing Trump of encouraging a personality "cult," then came back to the Trump statue, which remains un-erected.
The efforts to exalt himself, however, have accelerated in the past year far beyond his first term and have increasingly come to resemble eccentric regimes in far corners of the world. To those who have spent time in the former Soviet Union, the “Don Colossus” statue bears a striking resemblance to the rotating gold statue erected by Saparmurat Niyazov, the megalomaniacal former dictator of Turkmenistan who called himself Turkmenbashi and even renamed the months of the year after himself and his family.
Trump’s “Don Colossus” statue, tacky or not, was not commissioned by the president, and February is not yet known as “Trumpuary."
