Donald Trump’s presidency resists conventional categorisation. Analyses that treat him as a populist demagogue, an institutional stress test, or a media performer capture only fragments but miss the pattern. His fixation on monuments, his cultivation of personal movements, his invocation of divine election, and his architectural directives appear disconnected unless viewed through a different lens. Trump may actually be pursuing a coherent legacy strategy, one that has historical precedent but conflicts fundamentally with American constitutional design. Trump’s second mandate reveals a distinctive approach to presidential authority. Unlike his first term, which mixed policy ambition with institutional confrontation, the second term appears designed not primarily to administer but to imprint himself as a refounding father. Two dimensions emerge. Immaterially, the MAGA movement functions as political theology, a loyalty structure that bypasses institutional mediation and locates authority in the leader himself. Materially, a series of initiatives (mandating neoclassical federal buildings, renaming the Kennedy Center, and demanding that Penn Station and Dulles Airport bear his name) attempts to engrave his legacy in stone, whilst referencing imperial grandeur. 

They constitute a systematic effort to bind the future, to ensure that Trump’s mark on American politics outlasts his time in office. The intensity of the effort and the dual investment in both immaterial theology and material inscription suggest a leader who cannot trust institutions to preserve his legacy. Trump acts as though institutional channels offer no reliable path to endurance, as though he will be merely a moment rather than an epoch without alternative strategies. The monumental projects and theology-building reveal a leader for whom institutional channels are treated as unreliable vehicles of endurance, one who seeks alternative strategies for surviving political time. 

In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz identified a fundamental tension in political authority that helps to explain this behaviour. The ruler possesses two bodies. The body natural ages and dies. The body politic aspires to permanence. Medieval monarchy resolved this through a formula: “The King is dead, long live the King.” The physical body perishes. The dignitas, the immortal dignity of the office, passes to the successor. The question haunting every ruler is whether the political body will, in fact, survive the death of the natural one. 

Democratic systems, theoretically, resolve this through depersonalisation. As Lefort argues in Democracy and Political Theory (1988), the democratic revolution transforms power into an empty place where no individual, party, or class can claim permanent identification with state authority. The office becomes immortal by design, independent of any individual holder. Electoral rotation ensures succession without personalisation. The body politic is institutionalised, not embodied. But the tension persists. Leaders still face the knowledge that their decisions can be reversed, their policies dismantled, their achievements erased. Electoral defeat or term limits guarantee that someone else will inherit their authority. Will future occupants remember them? Will their name remain attached to institutions, policies, territories? Or will they be absorbed into the anonymous succession of officeholders? 

This anxiety intensifies when leaders perceive institutional channels as unreliable. If courts can overturn your signature legislation, if successors can dismantle your executive orders, if party structures can repudiate your legacy, then institutional immortality offers no guarantee. The body politic will survive, but your role in shaping it may not. Leaders who distrust institutions as vehicles for endurance must seek alternative strategies. 

Trump faces this problem with unusual intensity. Unlike presidents who built careers within established party structures and could rely on institutional loyalty to preserve elements of their legacy, he operates outside traditional Republican machinery. His relationship with congressional Republicans, the federal bureaucracy, and the judiciary has been confrontational. He cannot assume that institutions will carry forward his agenda after he leaves office. His first term demonstrated how quickly executive actions can actually be reversed. Biden dismantled Trump’s border policies, rejoined international agreements Trump had abandoned, and revoked executive orders within weeks of inauguration. Trump has reason to believe that institutional channels will not preserve his legacy. This creates structural pressure to pursue alternative strategies. 

Political power is uniquely exposed to time. Decisions are taken knowing that successors inherit the capacity to undo them. Laws can be repealed, norms erode, and administrative structures can be repurposed without formal rupture. What haunts rulers is not death itself but disappearance from the chain of causation that shapes the future. To govern is to act under the shadow of erasure. 

Two strategies emerge from this dilemma, each with deep historical roots in Western political practice and thought. The first treats authority as borrowed and temporary, seeking continuity through institutional restraint. The leader serves as a temporary trustee, dissolving the self into depersonalised institutions designed to outlast any individual holder. The stewardship tradition found systematic expression in Huguenot constitutionalist texts of the late sixteenth century, including the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), Hotman’s Francogallia (1573), and Bèze’s Right of Magistrates (1574), which argued that rulers hold authority in trust, not as their own. The second treats authority as creative, seeking endurance through visibility and material inscription. The leader attempts to make the body natural itself immortal, instead of transferring immortality to institutions, a tendency Elias analyses in The Court Society (1969) through Louis XIV’s systematic use of architectural grandeur and ritual to fuse personal authority with permanent symbolic form. Trump’s dual strategy of immaterial political theology through MAGA and material architectural inscription represents a systematic pursuit of the second approach within a constitutional system designed to enforce the first. 

American political culture encoded stewardship into constitutional architecture. The founders designed the Constitution, not the presidency, as perpetual. The officeholder was merely a temporary vessel for authority that precedes and outlasts them. As Madison argued in Federalist No. 51, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, the interest of the man connected with the constitutional rights of the place, not absorbed into personal legacy. Washington refused a third term, distinguishing between his mortal self and the immortal office, stepping aside to demonstrate that the office could survive without him. The founders embedded stewardship in practice through the separation of powers, judicial review, federalism, electoral competition, and administrative procedures that enforce depersonalised continuity structurally. Andrew Carnegie applied stewardship logic to private wealth, framing accumulation as temporary trust. To die rich without returning resources to the community was treated as a failure. Endurance was to be achieved through institutions such as libraries, universities, and foundations that outlived the individual. Carnegie, like Washington, dissolved the self into institutions. 

Monumentalism solves the succession crisis through opposite means, treating the ruler’s body as itself capable of immortality. Where stewardship accepts that the body natural must die and transfers immortality to institutions, monumentalism attempts to make the body natural itself endure through material form. Laws can be rewritten, customs fade, but architecture, aesthetic display, and symbolic canonisation promise a different form of endurance. Louis XIV’s declaration “L’État, c’est moi” fused the two bodies. Versailles outlasted his political institutions. Monumentalism required eliminating rival theories of authority. He expelled French Protestants carrying constitutional texts that treated kings as temporary trustees bound by covenant. 

From his first term through his return to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has pursued monumental strategies within a constitutional system designed for stewardship. The structural collision between competing responses to the succession problem produces the controversies surrounding his conduct. 

His inaugural address made the orientation explicit, employing language with deep roots in Christian kingship. Trump’s inaugural rhetoric operates in precisely this register. Referring to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, he declared that God saved his life to make America great again. He speaks as divinely elected, not as a temporary steward. Where stewardship treats authority as borrowed and temporary, Trump frames his presidency as a providential mission. The claim to divine preservation for a specific purpose places him outside ordinary succession. Kantorowicz (1957) termed this Christomimesis, the medieval practice of positioning the ruler as imitator of Christ’s dual nature, simultaneously human and divine. By claiming God saved him specifically to restore America, he positions himself not as a temporary vessel for constitutional authority but as an instrument of sacred mission. The immortal body politic is not the office of the presidency. It is Trump himself, chosen and preserved by divine will. The entire logic of constitutional stewardship is inverted. This constitutes the immaterial dimension of Trump’s monumental project, a political theology that locates permanence in the leader rather than the office. 

On 20 January 2025, his first day in office, Trump issued a presidential memorandum titled ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture‘. Eight months later, on 28 August 2025, he followed with an executive order, ‘Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again‘, mandating classical architectural styles for federal buildings. Issuing the memorandum on his first day signals architectural monumentalism as a foundational priority. Classical architecture, rooted in Greco-Roman traditions, carries an implicit theology of power. It inflates scale, monumentalises authority, and demands visual submission. Where modernist architecture treats buildings as functional containers, classicism treats them as permanent declarations of grandeur. Trump mandates that federal buildings declare permanence, hierarchy, and timelessness. The neoclassical style references periods of imperial grandeur when rulers such as Roman emperors and Napoleon successfully fused personal authority with material permanence. 

He is building a grand ballroom to the White House, a modification that would inscribe his presence into the physical fabric of the presidency. The aesthetic preferences (gold gilding, ornate furnishings, visual vocabulary borrowed from Versailles) signal that authority should look eternal, hierarchical, and opulent. Future occupants will inherit not just legal authority but the physical environment that shapes how authority is experienced and performed. Aesthetic choices are political theology made visible. 

He has publicly expressed interest in constructing a triumphal arch in Washington and being added to Mount Rushmore. The triumphal arch references Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, commissioned in 1806 as part of a programme of Roman imperial appropriation. Triumphal arches emerged in ancient Rome as permanent records of conquest designed to outlast the emperor and bind future generations to the memory of triumph, functioning as what Zanker (1988) describes as instruments for anchoring the victor’s legacy in monumental and symbolic form. When Trump invokes the Arc de Triomphe, he invokes Napoleon’s strategy of anchoring political legacy in material permanence through Roman forms. These material projects attempt to solve Kantorowicz’s succession problem through architectural permanence. 

In December 2025, Trump’s handpicked board voted to rename the Kennedy Centre “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts,” placing Trump’s name before Kennedy’s on the facade. The facility was designated by Congress in 1964 as a living memorial to the slain president. Legal challenges argue that only Congress can rename a congressionally-designated memorial. He subsequently announced a two-year closure beginning July 4, 2026, for “Construction, Revitalisation, and Complete Rebuilding.” The announcement followed a wave of artist cancellations. The renaming reveals monumentalism as an active erasure of a predecessor’s body politic. Kennedy’s memorial, in fact, literally has Trump’s name inscribed before his. The closure following the artist boycotts reveals the limits of the strategy. Stone can be renamed, but empty monuments offer no permanence. He can rename the building, but cannot make artists perform. 

In January 2026, Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer he would unfreeze $16 billion in federal funding for the Gateway tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey if Schumer agreed to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after him. Schumer rejected the offer, telling Trump he lacked the authority to deliver such a request. Trump continues to withhold the funding. New York and New Jersey have sued, alleging the freeze is unlawful. The Gateway Development Commission warns construction will halt, threatening thousands of union jobs. He is willing to sacrifice economic activity, regional infrastructure, and employment for the sake of naming rights. This suggests that monument-building functions here as a central governing strategy rather than a symbolic side project. A leader secure in institutional transmission doesn’t trade infrastructure funds for his name on buildings. Confident monument-builders command. Louis XIV commanded Versailles. The exchange, in fact, places naming rights within a coercive register, characteristic of monumental strategies when institutional transmission is uncertain. The $16 billion he withholds quantifies precisely what naming rights are worth to him: more than infrastructure, more than economic activity, more than policy outcomes. 

Beyond the Kennedy Centre, Penn Station, and Dulles, naming initiatives have proliferated across government programmes and symbolic instruments. The U.S. Institute of Peace now bears his name. The pattern extends from prescription drug websites to pathways to citizenship, from commemorative currency to investment accounts for newborns. The drive to inscribe permanence operates across every available domain of governance. 

MAGA emerged as a persistent political movement operating independently of formal office. Trump cultivated loyalty structures, symbolic rituals, and media ecosystems that outlast electoral cycles. Movements reproduce loyalty, language, and worldview across electoral cycles. They generate successors who inherit not only positions but interpretive frames. MAGA actually constitutes political theology in Schmitt’s sense (1922), a system grounding sovereign authority in personal decision and sacred legitimacy, displacing institutional procedure and locating power directly in the leader. He has positioned himself as champion of the people against the establishment, the swamp, the deep state. The strategy follows Machiavellian logic. Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), counselled that a durable legacy required a foundation among the people rather than among the elites who would eventually dismantle what threatened their power. MAGA functions as a loyalty structure that transcends traditional party discipline, reproducing itself through media ecosystems independent of formal Republican infrastructure. 

Yet MAGA faces the same problem as material inscription, the difficulty of surviving the founder’s death. The body politic can only achieve true perpetuitas when it becomes independent of the individual who embodies it. MAGA remains bound to Trump’s person. It reproduces his language, his grievances, his symbolic vocabulary. The movement’s coherence depends on Trump’s continued presence as the defining centre. Potential successors face a structural dilemma. They can imitate Trump, but imitation reveals dependency rather than independent authority. They can depart from Trump, but departure risks fracturing the movement. They cannot easily inherit his position because the movement is organised around his specific biography, his particular enemies, and his distinctive voice. He has built loyal followers but not autonomous institutions capable of reproducing authority without his presence. Both material and immaterial dimensions face the same vulnerability. They require his continued presence to maintain coherence. 

Trump’s approach differs from Louis XIV’s in a fundamental respect, one that explains why monumentalism generates friction instead of consolidation in the American context. Louis XIV could actually eliminate institutional carriers of alternative constitutional theories through coercion. The Huguenots could be expelled, their churches destroyed. Trump faces a stewardship ethic that is constitutionally embedded in the foundational structure of American government itself. Separation of powers, judicial review, federalism, and presidential restraint are all institutional expressions of custodial political theology. He can violate these norms, but cannot eliminate them. The structural mismatch produces the peculiar quality of conflict during his presidency. He operates as a monumental actor within a system designed to prevent monumentalism from succeeding. Louis XIV could make l’état, c’est moi a constitutional reality because he controlled mechanisms of coercion and could eliminate rival constitutional theories. Trump cannot. The American constitutional structure, precisely because it encodes stewardship as a foundational principle, resists the fusion of the two bodies. The result is friction, not transformation. 

From the perspective of stewardship, Trump’s actions appear destabilising and inappropriate. They violate expectations of humility, restraint, and deference to inherited institutions. From the perspective of monumentalism, they are internally coherent. He acts as a refounder operating within what he presents as a decaying system. The controversy is not about whether a ballroom will be built or an arch constructed or an airport renamed. The theory of authority embedded in these acts threatens the constitutional order more than the acts themselves. They imply that continuity will be anchored in the leader’s name and form rather than in depersonalised institutions. 

The American constitutional structure has absorbed periodic eruptions of monumental ambition before. Jackson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt all tested stewardship norms in moments of perceived national crisis. What distinguishes Trump’s case is not the ambition itself but the weakening of institutional counterweights that historically disciplined such ambitions. As trust in courts, Congress, administrative agencies, and electoral processes declines, the structural enforcement of stewardship becomes contested. He operates in an environment where institutional authority no longer commands automatic deference. When that acceptance erodes, structural mechanisms lose their disciplining force. 

This creates a dynamic that extends beyond Trump himself. Can institutional mechanisms enforce stewardship when trust in those institutions has collapsed? If institutional trust continues to erode, future leaders will, in fact, face similar temptations and similar opportunities. The question is not whether individual presidents will pursue monumental strategies, but whether the constitutional structure retains sufficient authority to discipline them. Stewardship depends on institutional mechanisms functioning independently of fluctuating public opinion, but those mechanisms require minimal legitimacy to operate effectively. Courts can overrule presidents, but only if their judgments command respect. Congress can check executive action, but only if its authority is recognised beyond partisan calculation. 

The tension between stewardship and monumentalism will persist. As institutional trust erodes across Western democracies, the temptation to bind the future through visible inscription will recur. Leaders operating in low-trust environments will increasingly pursue strategies that bypass institutional mediation and appeal directly to personal loyalty. Trump did not create this dynamic. He recognised and exploited it. His dual strategy of immaterial political theology through MAGA and material inscription through architecture and nomenclature represents a systematic attempt to solve the succession problem when institutional channels no longer offer reliable paths to endurance. 

The mediaeval formula presumed continuity: The King is dead, long live the King. The American formula presumed the office would survive the officeholder. When the officeholder seeks to make the office inseparable from themselves, the constitutional structure generates friction, finding itself incapable of accommodation. The Kantorowicz problem remains unresolved. The two bodies remain in tension. Leaders will continue to choose between limiting the self and amplifying it, as strategies for surviving time. Trump’s presidency exposes this tension with unusual clarity. His second mandate, designed not to administer but to imprint himself as a refounding father, actually tests whether the American constitutional structure can absorb a leader who systematically refuses the logic on which that structure was built. 

References

De Bèze, T. (2010/1574). Du droit des magistrats. Librairie Droz. 

Elias, N. (1983/1969). The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell.  

Kantorowicz, E. (1957). The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. 

Hotman, F., & Giesey, R. E. (2010/1573). Francogallia. Cambridge University Press. 

Languet, H. (1579). Vindiciae contra tyrannos: sive, De principis in populum, populique in principem, legitima potestate. 

Lefort, C., & Macey, D. (1988). Democracy and political theory. Polity Press.  

Machiavelli, N. (1993). The prince (1513). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. 

Schmitt, C. (2005/1922). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. University of Chicago Press. 

Zanker, P. (1988). The power of images in the age of Augustus. University of Michigan Press. 

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