On the first day of the first Black History Month of his first term, Donald Trump announced: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Whatever confusion the president’s tenses suggested over when America’s most eloquent abolitionist lived, Douglass, dead for 122 years then and almost 131 years now, is due all the posthumous recognition he gets. But when a group tapped by Congress suggested minting a Douglass quarter as part of next year’s semiquincentennial, the administration of the man who thinks Douglass has been amazing said “no,” The New York Times reported this week.
The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee suggested a series of coins, according to the Times, that would tell a story of America that doesn’t stop at the Declaration of Independence or the Revolutionary War but would also include abolition, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. But this second Trump administration, dedicated to the proposition that any comprehensive history of the U.S. amounts to godless DEI, has resisted minting coins celebrating the pluribus in our unum — even as it plans a coin celebrating Trump.
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
President Donald Trump on Feb. 1, 2017
In October, the U.S. Treasury shared proposed images for a $1 commemorative coin featuring an image of Trump on both sides. “Heads” showed the president’s profile and “tails” showed Trump with his fist raised, an American flag behind him and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” along the circumference. The administration appears to have since toned it down. But only slightly. Now each of the proposed reverse images shows a bald eagle, either alone, with the Liberty Bell or with the U.S. flag.
No U.S. coins depicted U.S. presidents until Abraham Lincoln was put on the penny — rust in peace, penny — in 1909, the centennial of his birth. George Washington’s face was added to the quarter in 1932, the bicentennial of his birth. Washington said “no” to having his face on a coin when he was president because that struck him as something only a king would do. But Trump, seemingly indifferent or outright oblivious to the pro-republic, anti-monarchist spirit of 1776, apparently glories in the idea of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding doubling as a celebration of himself.
“President Trump’s self-celebrating maneuvers are authoritarian actions worthy of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, not the United States of America,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement last week after he and Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced the Change Corruption Act. That act makes a declaration that all Americans ought to be able to get behind: “No United States currency may feature the likeness of a living or sitting President.”
U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach told the Times that the Democrats behind that legislation are “so triggered by the proposed coin celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary that they are trying to recklessly change law to block it.”
Beach is being deliberately obtuse. Trump’s face on a coin is no more a celebration of America’s 250th than Trump’s name on a high rise is a celebration of architecture. It’s not the job of the American government to create yet more reflecting pools for Narcissus.
America is bigger than a single person, even if that person is president. It’s one of the more disappointing coincidences of history that when the country’s big birthday happens, we’ll have a president who acts otherwise.
The coin advisory committee also suggested coins honoring Douglass and the suffragists as well as one honoring Ruby Bridges, who was 6 years old when she walked a gantlet of jeering segregationists and integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.
But the Trump administration rejected those ideas, just like in 2019 when it halted an Obama administration plan to have the liberator Harriet Tubman bump the genocidal Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill. Trump had dismissed that idea as “pure political correctness” and suggested that “Maybe we do the $2 bill.”
Although even some progressives have objected to the idea of honoring Tubman this way, the push to replace Jackson’s face with Tubman’s has been raised anew this year, and a descendant of Tubman continues to push for her inclusion on paper currency. At this point, it’s unclear if any of us will ever get to say that we’ve been spending twenties since they had white faces.
Trump’s stumbling Black History Month acknowledgment in 2017 was made by a new president who knew next to nothing about this country’s Black history but felt he needed to pretend to value it.
This term, he’s pretending less and less, and showing us more and more that he values nothing as much as memorializing himself.
