The Federal Government Systematically Attaches Trump's Name and Image to the State, From Passports to Taxpayer-Funded Banners

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Over the course of 2026, the Trump administration has undertaken an unusually systematic effort to attach the president's name, image, and signature to instruments of the federal government—currency, coins, passports, buildings, warships, benefit documents, and banners. NBC News counted at least a dozen distinct places where Trump's name or likeness is being added by the government, most tied to the country's 250th anniversary. Taken one at a time, several are cheap or symbolic; taken together, they represent what a group of senators and outside historians describe as a departure from a norm every prior president observed—reserving the state's official symbols for the dead, the founding, or the office rather than the sitting officeholder.

The Passport: The Most Visible Example

Starting July 6, 2026, Americans who apply for a passport in person at the Washington, D.C., passport office will by default receive a newly designed commemorative document bearing an image of President Donald Trump on its inside cover. The State Department, which announced the plan on April 28, describes it as a limited-edition tribute to the country's 250th anniversary. A State Department spokesperson confirmed the July 6 rollout date. It is, by the department's own account, the first time an image of a sitting American president has been placed inside a U.S. passport.

According to the State Department and images reviewed by NPR and NBC News, the design places Trump's picture over a gold imprimatur of his signature on an interior page, with his image superimposed over the text of the Declaration of Independence and an American flag. Another page carries John Trumbull's painting of the Founders signing the Declaration. In late June, Trump posted revised renderings of the artwork, one showing him seated behind the Oval Office's Resolute Desk.

The run is deliberately small—between 25,000 and 30,000 books—and there is no extra fee. The commemorative version is the default only for in-person applicants at the Washington Passport Agency; anyone applying online or elsewhere, and anyone who prefers the standard book, receives the existing design. Under the current currency of U.S. passports, the only presidents depicted are the four carved at Mount Rushmore—Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln—all long deceased.

A Systematic Branding Campaign

The passport is one of the more visible entries in a wider campaign, much of it tied to the semiquincentennial, to attach Trump's name and likeness to the federal government:

• Currency. In March 2026 the Treasury Department announced it was adding Trump's signature to U.S. paper currency—also a first for a sitting president, as bills historically carry only the signatures of the Treasury secretary and treasurer.
• Coins. That same month, the Commission of Fine Arts, by then composed entirely of Trump appointees, approved a 24-karat gold commemorative coin depicting the president in the Oval Office, alongside a planned $1 commemorative coin.
• Buildings. His name has been added to the exterior of the U.S. Institute of Peace—renamed the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace, the first federal building named for a sitting president—and to the Kennedy Center, rechristened to add his name, a change now being challenged in court.
• Warships. The Navy announced a new Trump-class of battleships.
• Benefit programs and documents. His name has been affixed to a discount-drug website (TrumpRx.gov), a children's savings-account initiative (Trump Accounts, promoted via TrumpIRA.gov), and the White House has begun stamping "Freedom 250" logos on Social Security cards issued for babies born in 2026.
• Immigration. The State Department launched the "Trump Gold Card" visa, offering foreign nationals legal residency and work authorization for a $1 million payment.
• Public lands. The Interior Department issued a redesigned national park pass featuring Trump alongside George Washington—prompting a lawsuit alleging it violated a 2004 law that reserves the image for the winner of an annual photo contest.

(Trump's push to attach his name to infrastructure has extended beyond federal identity items; see the separate entry on the Gateway tunnel naming-rights episode.)

Taxpayer-Funded Banners

The starkest financial example—and the one with the clearest legal exposure—is a series of giant banners bearing Trump's face and slogans that federal agencies have paid to produce and hang from their headquarters. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has documented the spending in two rounds of contract disclosures.

In a September 15, 2025 report, Schiff revealed at least $56,000 in taxpayer funds spent on promotional banners hung from the Departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services. Contract documents described banners as large as 88 feet, with a specification that they last "preferably 4 years"—language Schiff cited as evidence the expenditures were political rather than functional.

In July 2026, Schiff released newly uncovered documents showing the spending had continued and expanded, with agencies putting their own budgets toward "America First" and "Freedom 250" banners. The Department of the Interior awarded a $39,000 contract for "America First" banners featuring Trump's portrait, and the Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $114,000 contract for "Freedom 250" banners—roughly $153,000 in new contracts, both awarded to a Maryland-based graphic-design firm, Grafik Industries, as first reported by The New Republic on July 13, 2026.

Schiff argues the spending is not merely wasteful but illegal. "Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement," he said, "and an eight-story-high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda." The prohibition he invokes has appeared in federal appropriations statutes since 1951, barring the use of appropriated funds for "publicity or propaganda purposes"; the Government Accountability Office has interpreted the bar to reach self-aggrandizing and purely partisan communications. No agency has been formally charged with a violation, and the administration has not publicly responded to the July disclosures; the banners are characterized here on the basis of Schiff's reports and the underlying contract records he released.

The Anniversary Framing Is Itself Contested

Officials justified the passport and most of the branding as tributes to the country's 250th anniversary. That framing came under direct congressional scrutiny in early July 2026, when House Natural Resources Committee Democrats, led by Ranking Member Jared Huffman, released an interim report alleging the administration displaced the official, bipartisan America250 commission in favor of a Trump-backed private group, Freedom 250, and ran the celebration through it via pay-to-play fundraising, foreign solicitations, and possible criminal conduct. The administration denies any wrongdoing. The same anniversary the White House invoked to justify placing Trump's image on the instruments of the state was, Democrats allege, itself repurposed for political and financial ends (see the separate Freedom 250 entry).

Criticism

The passport plan drew objections well before the rollout. In a May letter, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), joined by Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Jacky Rosen, Tim Kaine, and Angus King, urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt the effort. The senators argued that the passport "has never—and should not now—feature an image of a sitting U.S. president," that using the nation's 250th anniversary to elevate the current officeholder "risks turning a unifying national milestone into a vehicle for personal promotion," and that no other country—including authoritarian regimes—places a current leader's portrait in its passport.

The anniversary's arrival brought a broader interpretive critique. In an opinion essay for The Atlantic published for the July 4 anniversary, "Trump's Anti-Patriotic Trap," Anne Applebaum argued that the administration's celebration reflects a nationalism rooted in blood, soil, and clan rather than the founding's creedal ideals. This is opinion writing, not reporting, but it articulates the through-line critics draw from the passport and banners to the wider anniversary campaign: that official symbols of a shared national story are being reoriented around one officeholder. Conservative outlets pushed back on this framing, mocking what one described as mainstream media weeping over America250.

Supporters of the individual items counter that the passport is optional, time-limited, and free, that commemorative designs marking national anniversaries are unremarkable in themselves, and that programs like TrumpRx and Trump Accounts deliver concrete benefits regardless of their branding. The point of contention, defenders and critics agree, is less any single item than the cumulative placement of a living president's name and face across the instruments of the state—and, in the banners' case, the use of appropriated funds to do it.