Objectively, Donald Trump’s decade-plus on the political stage has been historic. In 2015, when Trump descended the golden escalator of his eponymous tower to announce his presidential campaign, few believed he would win — and virtually no one anticipated how he would reshape American politics, culture and discourse.
Throughout his political career, Trump has exhibited an unprecedented resilience to controversy. In his first term, he survived widespread backlash to the Access Hollywood tapes, his administration’s family separation policies, the ‘Muslim Travel Ban,’ Charlottesville riots and two impeachment trials.
Through a daily cadence of divisive, exclamatory posts on X and impromptu rally speeches, the president helped shift the goalpost of political discourse from composed rhetoric and civility to virality and spectacle.
This spectacle reached its crescendo when Trump refused to concede his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. This decision not only undermined Democratic norms, but also began the series of events culminating in the Jan. 6 riots in the U.S. Capitol.
Four years later, Trump returned to the White House, riding stunning electoral shifts in his favor to the first nonconsecutive second presidential term since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
This inexhaustive summary of Trump’s first term reflects one of Trump’s most enduring impacts: the acceleration of the media cycle. With every scandal and tweet marking Trump’s tenure, Americans have grown increasingly desensitized to headlines that would have lingered for months in prior decades. Now, chaos is the norm. But the problem with chaos is that nothing stands out.This has created a problem Trump now seems increasingly desperate to solve in his final term: how can a presidency built on ephemera, spectacle and constant motion endure once the president in question is no longer the center of attention? To answer this question, we must look at what Trump has been doing to cement his legacy. In October 2025, he demolished the historic East Wing without approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, the agency responsible for overseeing construction involving federal buildings in the D.C. region, to build a 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom. Critics worry it will dwarf the White House, which totals about 55,000 square feet. Trump, who has also bragged about other renovations he has made to the residence, will permanently alter one of the country’s most iconic structures.Two months later, Trump renamed the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” before announcing in January, after substantial backlash and an exodus of artists, that the center would close for two years of renovations.On Saturday, Jan. 31, Trump mused about building a 250-foot “Independence Arch” in his honor near the Lincoln Memorial. Trump’s focus on physically manifesting his legacy is understandable given his roots as a real estate mogul. His approach also aligns with the standard Trump playbook of using virality to suck oxygen away from real issues, including the Epstein files and cutting nearly a trillion dollars of healthcare benefits for low-income Americans, both of which have led to government shutdowns.
As a legacy building strategy, it also mirrors how many past presidents have been immortalized: through monuments. The White House’s Truman Balcony gives America’s thirty-third president frequent airtime; Mt. Rushmore, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials and the Washington Monument are lasting reminders of the presidents they honor, and presidential libraries preserve the records and memories of each administration. The only difference, of course, is that an honor only means something when it’s earned, not coerced or self-given. When Trump accepted Venezuelan Opposition Leader Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize in January 2026, he fulfilled a longstanding wish. Well, sort of. Though the president claims to be a peacemaker who has ended eight wars since returning to office, his rhetoric and policies have caused violence domestically and abroad, making his repeated declarations of deserving the honor dubious. However, the fact remains: Trump did not win the prize, which the Nobel Committee confirms “cannot be revoked, shared or transferred,” and claiming it from Machado makes him no more a peacemaker than wearing a soldier’s medals, something Trump also did, makes him valiant. This gets at another limitation, aside from the news cycle’s velocity burying any achievements or blunders, that Trump must overcome to cement his legacy: reality. Performative gestures like these can only go so far in covering up real perceptions. Though Trump seems to have a stranglehold on how large swathes of Americans perceive him, Jan. 6 and his 2024 comeback prove this, keeping control of the narrative is becoming more difficult. The 79-year-old, who campaigned on a “macho” image, has recently contended with noticeable medical problems and even an online rumor that he had died after a multi-day public absence. Trump also faces increased divisions within the MAGA base over his aggressive immigration policy, interventions abroad, which critics argue clashes with his “America First” platform, and ties to deceased financier and pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who far-right conspiracists cast as Trump’s enemy in the QAnon theory. These divisions are most notably exemplified by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the one-time MAGA firebrand who resigned from Congress on Jan. 5. In a Jan. 28 radio interview, Greene said MAGA “was all a lie” and criticized Trump for serving wealthy donors. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who previously endorsed Trump, also criticized the administration after an ICE officer killed Renee Good, comparing the agency’s tactics to those of “the Gestapo.” Reality seems to be catching up to Trump, and it will be a lot more difficult to alter the narrative from the sidelines or, eventually, the grave. Trump’s ultimate legacy builder? Territory. Some of the most revered presidents in U.S. history have been, to say the least, problematic. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner, but he is still regarded by many as one of the greatest American presidents, in part because he added the Louisiana Purchase. Similarly, many historians forgive James K. Polk for his support of slavery and mistreatment of Native Americans because he added over one million square miles to the territory of the United States via the Mexican Cession, annexation of Texas and the Oregon Treaty. Simply put, in the broad sweep of history, land has largely papered over wrongs. This, I believe, is what drives President Trump’s obsession with Greenland. Trump argues that the U.S. needs to purchase, or take, Greenland for national security reasons and its vast mineral resources. However, I find these explanations unconvincing. As has been reported, and surely repeated to Trump by his policy advisers, there is already an agreement in place allowing the U.S. to maintain and expand its military presence in the territory, which is owned by NATO ally Denmark. Additionally, experts say that Trump’s mining plans are prohibitively expensive given Greenland’s icy terrain and lack of infrastructure. Besides, even if large-scale mining were viable, it seems as though U.S. companies could set up operations in the territory, as they do in many other countries, without a military invasion. The real reason Trump wants Greenland, arguably, can be found in a Jan. 9 statement he made in response to a question from the BBC. When asked why a temporary U.S. presence in Greenland was insufficient, Trump responded that “countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don’t defend leases.” It is this delineation between “owning” and “leasing” that is revealing. Trump doesn’t care about the practicalities of U.S. control in Greenland; he cares about the symbolic weight. I think Trump believes that if he adds a permanent territory to the U.S., it would permanently cement his legacy as a consequential president and paper over the unsavory realities that many in the MAGA movement are beginning to discover. However, that seems very unlikely to happen. After markets dropped sharply when Trump threatened multiple European countries opposing the Greenland acquisition with tariffs, Trump reversed the duties and his threats, reflecting the restraints twenty-first century economic globalization places on major international conflicts. As the Greenland drama illustrates, Trump’s legacy-building, and ultimately the legacy of any leader, is constrained by the realities of their actions, which carry lasting, undeniable impacts outside of their control. Trump, who was already ranked the third-worst president in U.S. history in a 2021 survey of presidential historians, will likely be remembered. However, the realities of his presidency — like his ties to Epstein, a historic climb in the national debt, rejecting climate action and eroding civic institutions — aren’t pretty.