Stewardship or Monument: Donald Trump and the Politics of Posterity |
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........