Trump coin is an illegal monument to monumental vanity

The United States Mint, that solemn factory of the nation’s coinage, has begun pressing a new golden dollar.

It is a handsome enough trinket, bearing the face of President Donald Trump on one side and a bald eagle on the other.

There is, however, a detail that seems to have escaped the official announcement: the whole business appears to be as illegal as a poker game in a church basement.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made the declaration this week from the steps of the Philadelphia Mint, a place that has stamped out honest currency for centuries.

This coin, he said, is to honor the nation’s 250th birthday—a fine and noble sentiment, to be sure. It is a “gold-finished” piece, which is a fancy way of saying it contains no more actual gold than a brass button.

It is made of manganese and other base metals, dressed up in a golden hue to fool the eye. When pressed on the legality of placing a living president’s face on the coin—a practice forbidden by federal law since the days when men wore stovepipe hats—Secretary Bessent offered a curious defense.

He pointed to the 150th-anniversary coin of 1926, which featured President Calvin Coolidge. A precedent, he called it. One might as well point to a single case of measles as a precedent for a pandemic. The law, which is supposed to be a steady guide, has changed a great deal since Mr. Coolidge’s day.

In 2005, Congress explicitly barred the likeness of any living president from appearing on currency. The 2020 law authorizing these very anniversary coins specifically forbids any portrait of a living person.

It is a peculiar sort of arithmetic that adds up to legality, but the administration seems to have a new kind of mathematics.

The irony, of course, is that the whole enterprise is dressed in the language of liberty.

The coin is inscribed with “Liberty” and “In God We Trust” and the dates 1776 to 2026.

The nation was born in a revolt against a king, against the very notion of a ruler’s face stamped upon the coin of the realm.

The Founding Fathers, who knew a thing or two about tyranny, explicitly forbade this sort of thing. George Washington himself refused to have his likeness on the first silver dollar.

He understood that the currency of a republic ought to be a symbol of the people, not of the man who happens to occupy the White House.

That lesson, it seems, has been lost in the shuffle of this golden age.

The coin is being struck as we speak. It will be sold to collectors, who will no doubt pay a pretty penny for the privilege of owning a piece of this particular folly.

The Treasury Department assures us that it is “in production” and will be available in the fall. They also assure us that it is perfectly legal, though they offer no convincing argument beyond a wave of the hand and a reference to a precedent that doesn’t actually apply.

The Commission of Fine Arts, a body that is supposed to advise on such matters, was overruled. The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee declined to even review the design. They understood, as any schoolboy might, that putting a living president on a coin is not merely a bad idea—it is an unlawful one.

One is left to wonder what the point of it all is. The president is already the most famous man in the land. His face is on the television, the newspaper, and the magazine covers that line the grocery store aisles. To put him on a dollar coin, a piece of currency that will never be spent, is to gild a lily that was already quite gilded enough.

It is a monument to vanity, a statue of the man who built the statue. And like all such monuments, it will be a source of embarrassment for those who come after.

The nation’s 250th birthday is a moment for reflection, for looking back at the principles that built this country. Instead, we are minting a bauble that seems to mock those principles, a golden trinket that says more about the present than it does about the past.

And that, perhaps, is the real tragedy of it.