The United States, that young republic which once fancied itself the antithesis of monarchical vanity, is now contemplating the embossed countenance of Donald J. Trump on its travel documents. The occasion: the nation’s 250th birthday. The reaction from Buckingham Palace: an eloquent, pregnant silence. One can almost hear the stifled chuckle from behind the gilded doors of Windsor.
This is not a mere aesthetic squabble over passport design. It is the apotheosis of a national neurosis: the desperate need for a founding father, a living avatar of a founding myth. The Americans, having long ago abandoned the intellectual rigour of the Enlightenment for the narcotic of celebrity, now seek a talisman. They have chosen, of all available faces, the most divisive, the most garish, the most relentlessly modern. It is as if the Holy Roman Empire had minted coins bearing the image of a particularly flamboyant circus master.
One must look to history for parallels, as is my wont. The Roman emperors, from Augustus to Constantine, understood the coin as propaganda. Their faces, laurel-wreathed and stonily divine, proclaimed stability, virtus, and the unbroken chain of authority. They were symbols of an empire that claimed the sun never set upon its domains. Trump’s face on a passport, however, is the opposite: it is a brand, not a symbol. It is the emblem of a nation that has bewildered itself with its own contradictions, a polity that cannot decide whether it is a republic or a personality cult.
The silence from London is instructive. The British monarchy, for all its anachronistic pageantry, has a certain decorum. Having faced its own crises of identity (the abdication, Diana’s death, the recent soap opera of succession), it has learned the value of restraint. To comment on this American eccentricity would be to dignify it. Instead, the Palace does what it does best: nothing. A studied silence that speaks volumes.
And yet, one must wonder if this is not also a subtle echo of the past. The American Revolution was, in part, a rejection of monarchical imagery, a declaration that the people themselves were sovereign. Now, the people’s representatives in Congress have voted (by what margin, one dares not ask) to put a single man’s face on the very document that certifies one’s citizenship. It is as if the nation has come full circle, embracing a gaudy pseudo-monarchy while still insisting on its republican credentials. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking.
Of course, this is all very on-brand for the current moment. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where the pursuit of meaning has been replaced by the pursuit of spectacle. The passport, once a bureaucratic tool, is now a canvas for nationalistic kitsch. And who better to adorn it than the man who turned the presidency into a reality television show? It is a fitting tribute to an era that has lost all sense of proportion.
Let us not be too harsh on our American cousins, however. Every empire has its clumsy moments. The Romans had Nero; the Victorians had Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition; we have this. But history will judge these decisions with the cold clarity of hindsight. Future generations, leafing through their grandfathers’ passports, will see that face and ask: what were they thinking? The silence from Buckingham Palace will be their answer.
