F Is for Fascist

You may have heard that a new coin has been approved to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Rather than portraying some of the usual symbols of this country, the gold (gold!) coin will inflict us with the currently living president's image:

As a recent Washington Post column by Philip Kennicott (gift link) put it, 

Trump faces the viewer straight on, instead of the more traditional side angle or three-quarter view. For millennia, profile images on coins suggested an outwardly directed vision, a leader surveying the world and looking to the horizons for both danger and possibility. Trump’s image functions more like a confrontation: He stares down the viewer, forcing a choice between accepting his authority or becoming his enemy.

Various wags on BlueSky have suggested it looks as though the grim Trump is having a bowel movement. Or that his stance suggests he is holding the grips of a walker, rather than leaning on a table.

For me, as a type-oriented person, I keep looking at the way the letter "E" in LIBERTY emerges from his head in a way that all but completely hides the lowest horizontal bar. This makes it look like an F. (Maybe we can call it the F-Head coin.)

On the coin's reverse, is an

"American eagle bearing neither the usual arrows and olive branch that symbolize war and peace but the wooden yoke of the Liberty Bell — a bit like an aggressive seagull making off with your hot dog." 

It is a "bellicose eagle whose clearly rendered talons echo the forward placement of Trump’s hands."

Kennicott goes on to explain that it was Julius Caesar who first had his image inscribed on a coin, and it was controversial when he did it, too. A contemporaneous historian

included the use of his image on coins among Caesar’s most egregiously self-aggrandizing acts leading up to his assassination.

“It is this moment when you see a transition from the collective ‘we,’ meaning the Republic, to the ‘them,’ to the individual, and you start seeing emperors putting image on coins,” [an American coin curator] said.

Caesar's actions were on the minds of Congress when they passed the Thayer Amendment in 1866, which prevented inclusion of living people on U.S. paper currency. Somehow, coins were not included in their action, but living people have not been shown on coins except in one instance Kennicott cites. In that case, "A lot of [the coins] were returned and melted down" because people did not like them. 

When the Trump design was approved, 

not one member of the Commission of Fine Arts — now stacked with Trump loyalists — objected to the legality or symbolism of the coin, or its egregious breach of democratic norms. They voted to approve it, and encouraged the U.S. Mint “to make it as large as possible,” because the president likes big things.

What a child. What a buffoon. And of course, what a would-be fascist dictator. 

He deserves the F he has designed for himself.