Trump’s Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality

The racist online video that President Trump recently shared and then deleted portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes and presented Mr. Trump himself as the "King of the Jungle." After a year back in the White House, his 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 monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock. Those efforts take physical form as well as imagery. His White House is pressing the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to display portraits by his supporters; a group of cryptocurrency investors shelled out $300,000 to forge a 15-foot-tall gold-covered bronze statue called "Don Colossus" to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla., and a 15-foot bronze statue of "Don Colossus" sat at the sculptor’s studio in Zanesville, Ohio earlier this month.

United States, Doral, Florida

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