The U.S. Treasury Department has announced plans to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026 with a one-dollar coin depicting President Donald Trump. In a draft rendering, he appears alone on the obverse and on the reverse, his fist is raised below the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.”
Rodney Kennedy
America’s distaste for flaunting presidential vanity extends to our first decades. Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1792, which stipulated that coins bear an allegorical depiction of freedom, along with the inscription “Liberty.” It did not specifically forbid the use of a president’s likeness. Therefore, Trump’s image on the coin may not be illegal, but it sure is tacky and concerning.
Only one president has graced a coin while still alive — Calvin Coolidge — and he appears next to George Washington. Coolidge’s place in history rests now with the architects of the Great Depression: William Graham Sumner, Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon.
“Only one president has graced a coin while still alive.”
In 2005, Congress authorized circulating commemorative dollar coins honoring each former president but stipulated that none “bear the image of a living former or current president.”
Legislation does prohibit the image of a president on the back side of a coin: “No head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin.”
In line with Trump’s habit of flouting convention, ignoring tradition, skirting and challenging settled law, the two-headed Trump coin will be a constant reminder of Trump’s presidency.
It’s idolatry.
My mind flooded with images in a remorseless rendition of Caesars, kings, emperors and dictators with their faces on coins. There’s Jesus saying, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”
Jesus makes it clear: The very possession of the coin makes them idolaters. Here we have a Second Commandment case study from Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.”
The coin puts in silver still life the long-revealed reality that Trump is the MAGA idol. Denied the Nobel Peace Prize, rebuffed for a place on Rushmore, Trump has to settle for a coin approved by one of his acolytes that most Americans never will use.
Can there be a more damning visualization of idolatry in America? Trump, in the ways of the crude nouveaux rich, eagerly plasters his image and name everywhere he can. It’s embarrassing.
“Can there be a more damning visualization of idolatry in America?”
The coin is more a silverplated version of a campaign button. On the obverse of the coin, Trump is the stern but good father of our nation and on the reverse he is the proverbial “bad boy” — the angry, transgressive leader who will save the nation.
There can be many representations in this hydra-headed Trump phenomenon, but the one core element consists of a monarchical pretension contradicting American independence.
Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, says the coin should celebrate the American republic and its people. Having the sitting president appear on a semi-quincentennial coin, he claims, only feeds “the cult of an individual perpetrated by that same individual” — exactly what Washington was intent on avoiding. He adds, “It is anti-American at its core.”
The coin is more a celebration of Trump’s January 6 insurrection than of our nation’s celebration of democracy and independence. The Trump silver dollar coin (I can’t believe it’s not going to be gold) underscores Trump’s anti-democracy proclivities.
The back side of the coin, with the chant Trump let loose after surviving an assassination attempt last year – “Fight! Fight! Fight!” – depicts Trump as the ultimate bad boy. The Trump glare shows him wielding his anger and macho rhetoric in defense of his followers. Hiding beneath the Trump two-faced image of the coin is an authoritarianism bereft of democracy.
Historian Gordon Wood, our premier scholar of the Revolutionary War, says the primary spirit of the first Americans was disrespect of authority. He catalogs how within a decade Americans embraced the radical notion that individuals are both the source of a government’s legitimacy and its greatest hope for progress.
I recommend dropping every Trump silver dollar in those ubiquitous one-armed thieves covering the floors of Mammon’s temples known as casinos (they bankrupted Trump at least three times) and take your chances. Your odds are about the same as sending checks to the aptly named televangelist Creflo Dollar.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.