In her 1984 book Missile Envy, Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of “Cold War Warriors” to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets.

US President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings.

Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities?

The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.

Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle and his unfinished great Mexican wall.

He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980 and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors.

Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow.

Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the US$30 billion (A$42 billion) Sochi Olympics and a US$1.4 billion ($2 billion) golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.

Trump believes that being President should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues.

Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 76 metres taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol.

Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the American public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history.

Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the President overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte, who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 46 metres, was completed.

Trump’s Arc gained approval despite a negative reaction. Photo: US Commission of Fine Arts

Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meagre crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route.

Recalled one observer:

“Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, 2000 guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen’s uniforms.”

Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s, saying: “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”

Painting over inadequacies

Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas of more than six by nine metres.

In 2014, Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation cheque to pay for a massive portrait of himself in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.

To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties.

Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy.

Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool”, the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 131-metre Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. 

That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom.

For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the colour and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for him at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began.

Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman as they lounged in the pool.

He followed by posting a photo of presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former house speaker Nancy Pelosi in the pool filled with faeces.

Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia

The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged paedophilia.

His masculine manoeuvres do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Centre, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.”

Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centres for the arts.

Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as President, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-storey Trump Tower“ becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 21-metre-tall aluminium Kartlis Deda (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue on Sololaki Hill.

Then there’s the now cancelled Trump Tower Down Under, a 91-floor development on the Gold Coast.

Garden of Heroes

Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes.

The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers”, activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons.

Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the US Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read.

Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $US200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass”, but no Botox or orange dyes.

Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs.

In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.

Paul Josephson is professor emeritus of history at Maine’s Colby College and the author of 15 books, with 40 years’ experience working in archives in Russia, Europe, and the US on the political history of modern science