The news crackles across the Atlantic with the force of a thunderclap: the United States, in its 250th year, will emblazon the face of Donald J. Trump upon its passports. A commemorative edition, they say, a birthday tribute to the republic.
But to those of us who still hold a candle for the quiet dignity of crowns and the hushed corridors of Buckingham Palace, it is an act of profound vulgarity. A nation that once stood for the sublime abstraction of liberty reduces itself to a personality cult. The passport, that humble document of movement, becomes a political billboard.
We have seen this before, in the wax museums of the late Roman Empire, where emperors stamped their visages on coins and edicts until the very idea of the state became indistinguishable from the man. The British monarchist circles, those custodians of a quieter form of pride, recoil with good reason. For them, the symbol of the realm is the sovereign, yes, but a sovereign who is a living link to history, not a four-year term’s occupant.
The passport should be a neutral key to the world, not a partisan badge. The Americans, in their relentless pursuit of the new, have forgotten that the true grandeur of a nation lies in its institutions, not in its transient leaders. This is the decadence of a republic that has lost its republican soul.
It is one thing to celebrate a milestone; it is another to deface the very document of travel with the image of a political figure. The irony is almost too sharp to bear: a nation born in revolution against a king now voluntarily submits to the iconography of a presidency. The Fall of Rome did not come with a single blow; it came with a thousand such gestures of vanity.
The monarchists may be dismissed as quaint, but their horror at this vulgarity is a reminder that some traditions guard against the madness of the mob. As for the Americans, they will soon discover that a passport bearing a face becomes a passport that cannot pass without comment, without prejudice, without the burden of politics. Happy birthday, America.
You have given yourself the gift of a caricature.
