The Kennedy Center’s presidential-appointed leadership says the institution is nearly out of money. President Donald Trump has offered to raise what it needs. On Tuesday, his appointees to the board will be asked to approve what a draft resolution says he requires in return: “appropriate recognition” of his role — which is to say, his name on the front of the building. Trustees have 10 inscriptions to choose from.

He has spent a year and a half remaking the nation’s capital in his image.

The columns have been refinished. Gold cherubs from the Mar-a-Lago ballroom sit above the Oval Office doors. The West Wing has been redesigned with an 18th-century-flare for European aesthetics and gold accents. Lafayette Square is being replanted with 47 maple trees, a nod to his ordinal spot among presidents. The Rose Garden lawn has been paved over. The community golf course is being rebuilt to championship standard. The East Wing has been torn down for a ballroom. On the South Lawn, a granite helipad was poured, judged unsatisfactory, torn out and poured again.

His name went up outside the Institute of Peace, which his administration had gutted a year earlier. House Republicans have introduced a bill to put his name on Dulles International Airport. And, Trump has reportedly pressed privately to put it on the Washington Commanders’ new stadium.

Last month, the president gave reporters a tour of the new granite helipad on the South Lawn, which was redone after complaints about how it was leveled on the ground. “I’m a real good developer, and, frankly, it used to make me sick to look at how horrible the condition [of the White House] was,” Trump said. “Now, it’s perfect,” he continued, as he stood on a grassless patch of the once-manicured turf. 

Interviews with aides, associates and historians describe a second term that has become the culmination of a life spent chasing fame, wealth and a particular idea of masculinity — and a president racing to make his mark permanent before his lame-duck years arrive.

Gwenda Blair, who first met Trump in 1988 and has written two books about him, says he wants to be “branded into the brains of Americans for decades, if not centuries to come.” What he understands, she said, is “the power of that built environment — that once it goes up, people don’t remember that it didn’t used to be there.”

A White House official, who requested anonymity to describe the president’s thinking, said Trump’s political arc echoes his business one: a “hot” start in real estate, a stretch of major financial trouble, then an explosion back into the mainstream on the back of a bestselling book and a hit NBC competition show.

That explosion “mirrors the second term,” the official said, describing it as the MAGA “movement on steroids” — the sequel to a lost 2020 campaign and a string of courtroom defeats. The same official said Trump “very rarely” discusses his pre-political life in private.

“He thinks that being president and being in politics” since 2016 “is way bigger than his time before that,” the person said.

Jason Greenblatt, who worked for Trump for two decades at the Trump Organization and then in the first term, says he sees “almost the exact same person” he met in 1996.

“I don’t think he’s changed at all,” Greenblatt said. Trump is “better equipped to handle whatever’s happening” in Washington, he added, but “from a personality perspective, it’s the same person.”

His habits are old ones. Blair said Trump’s father, Fred, drilled a punishing work ethic into him early. She described Fred’s ethos this way: “You’re awake; you’re working on the weekends; work six days a week, and on the seventh day, you drive around with the family in the car and visit construction sites and pick up unused nails. Because why would you waste a nail?”

Aides say Trump still sleeps very little, staying awake on Air Force One through overnight flights and posting on Truth Social into the early morning. Weekends, he walks the sites of his D.C. renovation projects.

“He’s always wanting to go further. There’s no resting place,” Blair said. “There’s no ‘it’s enough.’”

The biggest stage

In July, Trump had the largest audience of his life.

An estimated 1.5 billion people were watching when Spain beat Argentina in extra time at MetLife Stadium. Trump walked out with FIFA chief Gianni Infantino to hand the World Cup trophy to Spain’s captain, Rodri, and then stayed, clapping and smiling at the edge of the frame as the confetti fired and the players posed. Infantino appeared to try to steer him off. He didn’t move. Less than two hours later he called the tournament not just the best in FIFA’s history but “one of the greatest events of any kind ever held.” He takes credit for bringing it to North America.

Spain’s players posted their own photographs of the celebration that night. Trump is not in them. Neither is he in the ones FIFA posted. The next afternoon, the White House put out six pictures from the final, all of which include the president, two in which he is the only person in focus.

It was a version of something he has been doing his whole adult life in front of steadily larger crowds. A career in the limelight — with cameos in box-office movies, rap-song references and on talk-show couches — now plays out on Trump’s biggest stage yet: the Oval Office, where his confrontations with foreign leaders, among them Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa have been staged and lit like reality TV.

A practice of branding businesses with his surname, from Trump Hotels to Trump University, also followed Trump to the nation’s capital, but this time on properties that he does not own. A White House official acknowledged that “leaving his imprint on this city” and on “this presidency” is “definitely” important to Trump, along with visiting places that “no other president would ever probably carve out time for.”

That includes appearances at the NBA Finals and the Super Bowl; an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight card in the White House’s backyard; and an IndyCar race on the National Mall. It has also meant courting the manosphere influencers with the largest audiences, and running a social media platform built so that the world waits on his posts. “Nobody in the history of the internet has utilized social media to the success that President Trump has,” another White House official said. “We all hear directly from him, unapologetic and authentic.”

Pastor Mark Burns, a former congressional candidate who has served as an informal spiritual adviser to Trump since 2015, said second terms tend to loosen presidents up.

“They can finally have that sigh of relief that now I can just focus on not so much what others wanted done, but I’m going to focus on how I want to leave my mark and my legacy as the president,” Burns said.

‘A sense of permanence’

Trump’s legacy may not necessarily be the one he describes. The president’s approval rating currently sits at just 38% amid an increasingly unpopular war with Iran, record-high gas prices and a faltering economy. 

In March, an estimated eight million people turned out across more than 3,300 “No Kings” events in all 50 states and more than a dozen countries — by organizers’ count, the largest single-day protest in American history, and the third such round in nine months. His critics also point to his ballooning net worth and to his children’s expanding business interests as corruption.

Which may be why the construction matters so much: Reputations are contested. Buildings are harder to tear down— though, it turns out, not impossible.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued over the East Wing demolition, arguing Trump could not raise a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the site without Congress. On Aug. 31 the Supreme Court, divided 5-4, set aside previous rulings and let construction continue, holding only that the Trust likely lacks standing and expressly declining to rule on whether the project is legal. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberals in dissent, arguing that the construction that had gone on for the better part of a year was likely unlawful.

By then it hardly mattered. The government had told the court the structure should be substantially finished by November, and that the work was past the point of return.

“He’s trying to create a sense of permanence in Washington – the nation’s capital, center of the ‘free world,’” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who has known Trump since the 1990s and written books about his leadership style.

Presidents have always shaped their afterlives through foundations, libraries and dedications, and Trump is planning a library of his own: a skyscraper on the Miami waterfront, on land handed over by a state college, with a Qatari-gifted 747 in the lobby and replicas inside of the Oval Office, the colonnade and the ballroom. He says it will most likely be a hotel, and that work won’t begin until he has left office.

But because of Trump’s age, he “can’t reasonably assume” he’ll be alive to witness the opening of his own presidential library, said Rebecca Brannon, a James Madison University history professor. “It might [happen], but it wouldn’t be an easy assumption.”

In a statement, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said that Trump “is a one-of-a-kind leader who will always unapologetically advance America’s interests — the only legacy he is concerned with is making America greater than ever before.”

Countdown to 2028

The clock is not in his favor. If Democrats retake the House in November, they will likely open aggressive investigations into Trump and his allies, and his final two years could be defined by headlines his adversaries generate.

His party’s attention — and that of the press and public — will likely move on, too. Once midterms are over, the GOP will begin turning its attention to the 2028 presidential election. “From November onward, the focus will be on an election which Trump is not running in,” said historian Benjamin Waterhouse. 

“He’s becoming a lame duck, unfortunately,” a Republican operative familiar with the party’s midterm strategy told MS NOW, granted anonymity to address a sensitive topic.. 

Greenblatt argues that won’t slow Trump down. There is “zero chance that even if the midterms don’t go his way, that he will not spend the rest of the time until the next inauguration trying to achieve his goals, his agenda, his policies,” he said. “Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn’t know President Trump.”

Sonnenfeld agrees. “He’s not winding down,” he said. “He’s trying to figure out how to fortify his power, his strength and his centrality.”

Trump flirts, too, with staying in power beyond the end of his second term. He sometimes wholly denies he would attempt to run for an unconstitutional third term. But as recently as early August, Trump quipped, it “could be a long time” before he leaves office.

“Who knows? But it could also be fairly quick, they say two and half years,” he said. “We’ll find out.”

Inside the West Wing, aides who fall short of his expectations still fear a summary firing. Outside it, his endorsement remains the surest path to the party’s 2028 nomination, and the contest for it is likely to come with some hazing.

“I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice,” Vice President JD Vance, a 2028 frontrunner, quipped sarcastically.

But GOP operatives are leaning on the man who has shaped the party for the last decade in November despite his sinking approval ratings. Another strategist, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly, told MS NOW that internal research shows voters respond more favorably to policies explicitly tied to Trump, adding that the party’s base now is lower-propensity voters who care about supporting Trump’s agenda.

“It’s just a matter of getting them out to the polls,” the second person familiar with the GOP’s midterms strategy said. “If you don’t show up and vote, there’s a chance that Democrats flip a chamber of Congress, and then it basically neuters the last two years of President Trump’s presidency.”

At the GOP midterm convention last week, Trump told voters to pretend he’s running. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said. He added: “Just one more time.”

The post Why Trump keeps renovating: Reputations can be debated. Buildings are harder to remove. appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.