Column: Trump’s motto in 2025? ‘Me, myself and I’
The most potent attack ad of Donald Trump’s comeback campaign seemingly ran on a loop during the final weeks before the 2024 election. Assailing rights for transgender people, its punch line indeed delivered a punch: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
2025: Promise broken. Back in office, the president has shown that the only pronouns he really recognizes are the first-person kind: me, myself and I.
A year into Trump 2.0, those self-regarding pronouns are now firmly affixed as the bywords of his presidency, on matters major and mundane. They might as well be mounted in gold in the Oval Office, in fonts so large as to not get lost amid all the bling he’s installed there. Asked in October just who was to be honored by Trump’s planned Arc de Triomph-like monument near Arlington Cemetery, the president was quick: “Me.”
To an extent that’s shocked even critics long convinced of his sociopathic narcissism, Trump has fashioned a government that’s of Trump, by Trump and for Trump. “I run the country and the world,” he boasted in April. Trump thinks “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” his White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair, as reported in two articles last month that signaled her own unease with Trump’s ongoing vengeance against his political enemies; his clemency for even the most violent rioters of Jan. 6, 2021; the pain of his erratic tariffs, too-cruel migrant roundups and tragic shutdown of USAID’s humanitarian aid; his stonewalling of the Jeffrey Epstein files that candidate Trump promised to release; and the foibles of his slavish Cabinet.
If Trump strutted as the center of the universe in 2025 — unchecked by advisors like Wiles or by a cowed Republican-controlled Congress, the Supreme Court and corporate chieftains — buckle up for 2026. It marks the 250th birthday of America’s independence, and our self-appointed master of ceremonies is focused on the festivities that he’ll star in not only on July 4th but all year long. One of his first acts as president was to create a White House task force with himself as chair, of course, to plan semiquincentennial events, ignoring an eight-year-old commission created by Congress for that purpose. Coming soon: A (possibly illegal) commemorative $1 coin with Trump’s image from the U.S. Mint.
Never mind that 2026 starts with a big spike in health insurance costs for tens of millions of Americans, including many Trump voters. The president who campaigned on bringing down the costs of living has stood in the way of a legislative remedy to the Dec. 31 expiration of healthcare premium subsidies, repeatedly mouthing his years-old promise that he’ll propose a cheaper alternative within weeks.
But here’s how 2026 will end: with midterm elections in November that loom as a referendum on whether the Trump Republican Party should keep control of Congress. The early betting is that no, it won’t. Especially after another year of Trump grandstanding, and his party’s genuflecting.
In good times, Trump’s garish self-regard might be tolerable to voters, even comical. But these aren’t good times, hardly the “golden age” Trump announced in his inaugural address last January — except for him and the wealthy hangers-on at his seemingly endless round of parties in the White House and at Mar-a-Lago. The Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Trump’s Florida resort was especially rich, pun intended, coming as it did hours before federal food aid for 42 million Americans expired amid a government shutdown he’d done nothing to avert.
Days later, voters gave a shellacking to Republicans in various states’ 2025 off-year elections, which is a good omen for the same result nationwide in 2026. There are other signs. On Tuesday, a new Gallup poll showed three out of four Americans were dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the United States.” Trump’s approval rating was just 36% in Gallup’s poll in early December, his lowest reading of the past year, and nearly equal to his all-time low after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Averages of various polls show Trump with negative ratings on his handling of immigration, the economy, trade and tariffs, and inflation — all issues that helped get him reelected.
But go ahead, Mr. President. Keep talking about how great you are. You’re a legend in your own time and mind.
Trump’s tone-deafness has become the great mystery of U.S. politics, for both parties, especially considering that he slammed President Biden for bragging about the economy’s post-pandemic recovery when Americans weren’t feeling it.
As Americans struggle to buy a home or to afford its upkeep, Trump has gilded the People’s House (see the New York Times’ recent 3-D recreation of the Oval Office for full, nauseating effect) and transformed the bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom in marble and gold. Having demolished the East Wing to make way for a gargantuan ballroom where Marie Antoinette would be at home, financed by favor-seeking billionaires and corporations, Trump told reporters on Tuesday that it would have to be bigger than he’d first planned because “we’re gonna do the inauguration” there.
What? The man who’s supposed to be leaving office on Jan. 20, 2029, is picking the new location for the next presidential inauguration? Hmmm.
Even before he’s been in office a year, Trump has put his brand on two Washington buildings, including the nation’s 60-year-old cultural center named by law as a memorial to an assassinated president. The Kennedy Center (no, I will not call it by Trump’s name) will have marble armrests; Trump took to social media on the day after Christmas to show off samples. Meanwhile, he’s refurbishing a royal jet from Qatar, a “palace in the sky.”
Trading on his power in unprecedented ways, Trump was a “crypto billionaire” by May, the Wall Street Journal reported, and in August the New Yorker estimated that he’d profited in office by at least $3.4 billion through crypto and licensing deals.
No, Trump is not for you. He’s for he/him.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes