In 1990, Playboy published an interview with Donald Trump in which the future president offered his thoughts on foreign affairs, the death penalty, and why he puts his name on everything. He also reflected on the meaning — or, perhaps, meaninglessness — of life. “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it is all a rather sad situation,” he said. “We’re here and we live our 60, 70, or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”

It’s no secret that every president cares about how they’ll be remembered. But that pithy, 35-year-old quote explains a whole lot about Trump, his rise to power, and how he governs today. He doesn’t only want a legacy, be it good or bad. Even winning the presidency twice doesn’t suffice. What Trump really wants is to — in some way or another — live forever, and he’s only just getting started.

By now, Trump’s imprint on the world is indelible. His ability to wiggle out of legal consequences for his corruption and lawlessness has ushered in a new era of presidential immunity. His inability to admit defeat in 2020 nearly resulted in a coup d’etat and seriously undermined voters’ faith in American elections. And his harsh immigration crackdowns, his fixation on birthright citizenship, and his censorship of speech have challenged the very ideals of what it means to be an American.

But to fully understand Trump’s broader political project and how he has successfully transformed America, you have to recognize that he isn’t only a political figure, but something much bigger: a cultural icon in the crudest sense.

It’s that side of Trump that begins to explain one of the weirdest aspects of his presidency: his focus on aesthetics and how aggressively he is forcing his particular style and taste onto America. Whether it’s making the White House look more like his private residences or turning the arts into his own pet project, Trump is trying to fundamentally change how America’s government is perceived. Put another way, when we look at the government’s buildings and institutions, Trump wants us to see only him — even after he’s gone.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that Trump has always sought fame. Because what Trump has really been chasing his entire adult life has been omnipresence. Celebrity status, untold fortune, and television success were never going to be enough; he wants to be everywhere. For a big chunk of his New York business years, Trump was completely obsessed with the idea of having the biggest and tallest buildings in the world. He injected himself into the American zeitgeist decades ago, giving tabloids enough gossip to fill their pages with scandal after scandal since the 1970s. His real estate career, his offensively lavish lifestyle, and his eventual rise as a reality TV star made him, in many ways, a caricature of American capitalism’s excesses.

That never-ending pursuit of omnipresence has shaped Trump’s political career and presidencies, perhaps more than anything else. After all, from a political standpoint, Trump has been all over the place: He has been a Democrat, independent, and a Republican. He sought to befriend Hillary Clinton — donating to her Senate campaigns and the Clinton Foundation — before eventually running against her in 2016. And while there are some policies and ideas that Trump has long been committed to, like tariffs or racist conspiracy theories, he has always been more devoted to himself than any policy agenda.

His true desire, it seems, wasn’t to simply become the president of the United States, but to become the single most enduring representation of America itself.

Trump’s political project, in other words, is to rebrand America. He’s seemingly not so desperate to eke out wins for the Republican Party so much as he is trying to remake America in his own image. Gone are the days where America is promoted as an idea — a nation of immigrants or an unfinished project that every generation of Americans strives to improve — because in his eyes, America is Trump.

The roots of Trump’s aesthetic

To understand Trump’s aesthetics, you have to go back to the 1980s lifestyles of the rich and famous in New York, the time and place that defined Trump’s rise in American culture. A lot of what Trump values today —

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