Editor’s Note: Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author with Peter Eisner of “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Last month at Mount Rushmore, the President posed for a photo at an angle that aligned his head with the 60-foot-tall heads gazing out from the mountain. For a moment, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump formed a quintet in the warm evening light.
Did you see it? I did, and I wondered then if he was imagining himself up there, too. Trump is acutely conscious of cameras, and knows what can be communicated in a picture. Perhaps he wanted all of us to imagine him in granite, too. But then I decided, “Even Trump isn’t that egotistical.”
Apparently he is.
Trump denies asking the South Dakotans to put his face on Mount Rushmore. But the press in South Dakota reported, and The New York Times confirmed, that Trump and his aides inquired about that very thing. And on Monday, Trump being Trump, the man who once said he was more “presidential” than all his predecessors save Lincoln complicated his denial by saying on Twitter: “Sounds like a good idea to me!”
Of course it does. Trump is so devoted to the cult of himself that he campaigned to run the country saying “I alone can fix it.” When the quirks of the Electoral College gave him the Oval Office despite his losing the popular vote by about 3 million, he declared a “massive landslide victory.”
Adding Trump to Mount Rushmore would be a challenge, since it lacks room for another giant head. But if you let yourself think like the President, then it’s possible to figure out a way around the problem.
As a builder, Trump often took over sites where he gutted or demolished, and then re-faced much of what existed in order to create something new. (In Manhattan, the old Commodore hotel – which would become the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and the Gulf & Western building – later Trump Tower on Columbus Circle – were examples.) In the case of Mount Rushmore, he could perhaps knock off a bunch of stone, turn the face of the mountain into a blank slab, and “renovate” it to include himself.
The original Rushmore sculptor, nativist and Klan sympathizer Gutzon Borglum, who also worked on Georgia’s Stone Mountain monument to the Confederacy is long dead. However, Trump doesn’t lack for artists who are willing to immortalize him. (Consider, if you will, the Trump oeuvre of Utah’s Jon McNaughton.) Surely, he could find someone eager, and capable, of re-carving a mountain.
But as persuasive as Trump can be, it is possible that permits for renovating Mount Rushmore won’t be as easy as navigating zoning regulations to redo an old apartment building. Recall though, that Donald Trump is nothing if not imaginative: he could have other options in mind.
Why not a new national attraction – Mt. Trumpmore – that could be established as a private (why not make some money on it) monument to the Trump clan?
Having built what was once the tallest concrete skyscraper in the country in Chicago, the President might consider making his own mountain in a place more convenient to travelers than some remote mountain range. Instead of expensive stone carvers, he could hire workers to pour industrial concrete into enormous molds, and, unlike New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, which collapsed in 2003, a fake mountain could be easily repaired.
Phase 1 of Mt. Trumpmore would be construction of a visitors’ center, where ticket buyers be admitted to a theme park-style ride through the story of Donald Trump, from his beginnings in his father’s humble Queens mansion to his capture of the White House. Along the way a little roller coaster section would make quick work of his bankruptcies and failed marriages before the glide in a glass-bottom boat through “The Apprentice” years.
The “first faces” on Mt. Trumpmore would include the President, First Lady Melania, and of course daughter and Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared, both senior advisers to the President. Taking into account Trump’s fondness for the color gold, it might be a nice touch for his luxurious mane to be fashioned from some sort of delicate golden wire.
And visitors to the mountaintop might find shade under the swooping ducktail in the back, or perhaps this section could form the roof of a snack bar.
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Mt. Trumpmore should be imagined to accommodate more and more Trumps as the need arises and funding holds out. Phase II of the project might allow for the addition of Donald Trump Jr., Erik Trump, and perhaps even Tiffany Trump and Barron Trump. It’s possible these four would have to notch serious accomplishments to merit inclusion, but then again, it might be enough for them to stay loyal to the paterfamilias.
If all of this sounds ridiculous, you are right, and it’s possible that the President is having a chuckle as people like us consider whether his request to join the immortals on Mount Rushmore was sincere.
Then again, don’t count it out. You really think he hasn’t fantasized about it?