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Saturday, May 09, 2026
ANNALS OF TRUMPI$TAN: Trump demands gratitude in D.C. So he put up banners thanking himself. (Phillip Kennicott, WaPo, May 7, 2026)
From The Washington Post:
Trump demands gratitude in D.C. So he put up banners thanking himself.
Signs appearing around the capital twist appreciation and patriotism into an authoritarian knot.
New banners that have appeared around Washington show President Donald Trump in a hard hat with construction scaffolding creating a horizon line beneath him. The scaffolding is crimson red, the hard hat is white, and emblazoned on the blue sky behind him are the words, “Thank you, President Trump.”The signs were posted on fencing around construction sites where the National Park Service is renovating and refreshing parks and public spaces, part of the president’s initiative to spruce up Washington as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary. A spokesperson for the Interior Department didn’t respond to questions about how many banners have been hung, whether they are appearing outside of Washington, or how much the new advertising campaign is costing the department.
Compared with the giant banners of Trump’s glowering image hanging on federal office buildings, including the once-independent Justice Department, and the renaming for Trump of public landmarks and memorials such as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, these banners are a relatively small authoritarian incursion into the public realm. But they touch upon two key nerves in the body politic: The tension in a democracy about how and to whom credit for public works and programs should be given, and narratives of gratitude particular to American history, including the gratitude freely offered by immigrants and refugees, and the forced gratitude demanded from enslaved people.
Workers install a banner featuring an image of President Donald Trump on the Justice Department in February. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)“While they are not averse to taking credit for things, presidents have typically not plastered their names around Washington and the country,” saysBarbara Perry, a professor and presidential scholarat the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to the study of the executive branch. Presidents in the past “have viewed that as arrogant and unseemly.”But giving and taking credit in Americanpolitics is complicated. The names of governors are frequently attached to signs announcing new bridges, tunnels and highways. Members of Congress have never been shy about advertising the money they bring back from Washington for local projects. Perry says that personality is a factor. As senator, for instance, Robert Byrd of West Virginia was never shy about having his name on things. And, Perry adds, with local offices that moredirectly affect people’s daily lives, there is a higher tolerance among voters for a transactional relationship in which politicians take credit for bringing home the pork.At the presidential level, however, it is more fraught. Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College, cites the example of Richard M. Nixon sending the public a letter claiming credit for a congressionally approved large bump to the Social Security cost-of-living increase, just before the 1972 elections. But, he says, “as with so much else, Trump is just much more public about this” and,compared to previous presidents, much more overt about demands for gratitude, honors and loyalty.“George Washington was embarrassed to be called ‘your excellency,’” Rudalevige notes.Recent examples of politicians taking credit for projects that they voted against — showing up for ribbon cuttings after voting against the infrastructure bill — demonstrate the necessity of informed credit-giving. If voters consistently reelect leaders who don’t serve their interests, democracy can’t function.But there is a big difference between giving credit, taking credit and demanding gratitude. And the tone of the National Park Service signs, a seemingly direct demand from the president for thanks, is an unprecedented shift away from the more common attribution of work to taxpayers, or signs that read “Your fee dollars at work,” connecting park entry fees to capital improvements.
A sign at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Wednesday. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post)In the first Trump administration, author and historian Diana Butler Bass noticed the extraordinary degree to which the then-45th president personalized the demands for gratitude, a habit even more entrenched in his second administration. She connected that to ancient forms of imperial rule, in which the leader was seen as the font of all good things, gratitude to him was compulsory, and the public lived in a perpetual state of indebtedness to the emperor.“When a politician is demanding gratitude, and you don’t pay up — and the price of not paying up is you are deemed to be disloyal — that is a very dangerous situation,” Bass said in an interview. “That is worship.”
Trump’s demands for gratitude have a performative, often theatrical aspect, which has become only more pronounced in his second term.
The most profound changes in American foreign policy since the 1930s — rupture with long-standing allies, territorial claims on Greenland, the fracturing of NATO — are premised on the supposed ingratitude of the world to American benevolence. That echoes a common theme of the new culture wars at home, in which gratitude and patriotism are equated, and ingratitude imputed to anyone who doesn’t agree with ideas about American exceptionalism.
During the first Trump administration, conservative scholar John O. McGinnis wrote,“Identity politics — the even worse successor to the political correctness of the 1990s — is problematic in no small part because it lacks gratitude for the achievement of the past.” Vance has made that a recurring theme of Trump’s second term.
The issue is volatile because gratitude is an essential part of many people’s spiritual lives, interwoven with genuine love of country and yet deeply connected since ancient times with paternalism. In Plato’s dialogue “Crito,” Socrates explains why he will not attempt to escape his impending execution. He uses the analogy of the family to make a dangerous claim: that gratitude to those who nurture us compels our loyalty to them.
If you accept that paternalistic premise, even dissent can be seen as culpable ingratitude.
Yet last month, at the annual Italian Cultural Society gala dinner, several speakers acknowledged their gratitude to the United States for having taken in their grandparents or great-grandparents decades ago. That gratitude overgenerations remains a powerful living force, fundamental not just to love of country but love of the country’s ideals.
But gratitude is easily manipulated, or as Bass puts it, “corrupted.” And among the most egregious examples of that are the forced displays of gratitude compelled from enslaved people before the Civil War. This was a rhetorical and performative inversion of basic decency, but it served a purpose that may help explain the role gratitude plays in the Trump administration. Gratitude reinforced the status of both the enslaved person as inferior and the enslaver as a supposed provider of food, clothing and shelter. “The masters desperately needed the gratitude of their slaves in order to define themselves as moral human beings,” Eugene D. Genovese wrote in his 1974 history of slavery, “Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.”
A banner in Logan Circle with a graffiti tag on it Wednesday. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post)The enforced performance of gratitude, and the delusional soaking-up of compulsory thanks as if it were genuine, creates a toxic, closed loop of lies. Frantz Fanon noticed the same phenomenon among the French as they confronted resistance to their colonial rule in North Africa. And even refugees who are deeply grateful to the United States for asylum speak bitterly of the expectation that gratitude requires them to model ideal civic and personal decorum.There are few easier ways to discredit and humiliate a person than accuse them of ingratitude, “one of the most detestable vices,” according to Immanuel Kant. Ordinary Americans, passing a sign that implicates them in gratitude directly to president, may find their own resistance to the idea slightly uncomfortable. Who wants to be an ingrate?Perhaps that’s why these signs are so particularly upsetting, even though they are smaller than the giant banners with Trump’s scowling face, and they are posted at worksites where long-overdue renovations are taking place. The larger Trump banners are one-way messaging, an assertion of his power and omnipresence. The thank-you banners catch us up in the performance, implicating us in a spectacle of insincerity and falsehood. They put words in our mouth. And if there’s anything worse than being bullied into silence, it is being bullied into saying what you do not believe.
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