You Can Have the Anniversary or the Face. Not Both.

Founders rejected monarch‑style portraits on our money—and a Trump anniversary bill would overturn that republican instinct rather than honor it.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the Treasury Secretary about plans to put the president’s face on U.S. currency. “I don’t think that there’s anything untoward about having the person who was president of the United States on the 250th anniversary bill,” he concluded.

Would the founders being celebrated 250 years later have agreed? Let’s turn to the record:

In 1792, Congress debated what to put on the new country’s coinage. Congress ultimately chose not to use the president’s portrait, in part because such imagery resembled the monarch’s face on British coins as some contemporaries understood it. The Coinage Act of 1792 called instead for an image “emblematic of liberty” and the word “Liberty.” This was not a matter of taste that drifted. Congress made a conscious choice for an allegorical Liberty instead of a portrait of a current officeholder.

The worry was plain. Treat the president as a sovereign and he forgets he serves the people. He becomes the institution instead of its steward. The men who built the thing we are about to celebrate looked at the idea of treating the president like a monarch and called it monarchical—and the president they would have honored most embodied the instinct against it.

You could ignore their reaction, but then your 250th celebration becomes a little empty. Like toasting the founder of a temperance union with Jell‑O shots.

The instinct was eventually written into law in the nineteenth century. In 1866 a Treasury official named Spencer Clark printed his own face on a five‑cent note—a bill meant to honor the explorer William Clark, which had reached the Treasury specifying only “Clark.” A bureaucrat had put himself on the money. Representative Martin Russell Thayer rose on the House floor, held up the note, and called the practice “derogatory to the dignity and the self‑respect” of the nation. Congress responded by barring the portraits of living persons from United States notes and similar federal paper obligations.

The Treasury Secretary waved off the question, and mocked the Washington Post story for reporting on the administration push to put Trump’s face on the bill.

This is one trait the administration shares with Washington. The first president disliked what he read in the press too, but for the opposite reason. Five months into his second term, the unanimously re‑elected Washington stormed into a cabinet meeting in a rage.

What set him off was a cartoon in the paper. It put his head on a guillotine, in the manner of executed French royalty—taunting him for tilting toward Britain in foreign affairs. The charge underneath: you claim to be a republican but you govern like a king, you side with kings, and history has a verdict for kings.

He hurled a newspaper to the floor. He “defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives,” and swore that “by God he had rather be in his grave than his present situation.”

For a man who had fought a king, no slander cut closer. He raged because he was accused, in this tiny way, of acting like a monarch.

We celebrate founding moments to refresh founding ideas, to keep fashion and sycophancy and pride from obscuring the values the nation was built on. One of those values was that the people who hold power should not confuse the office with themselves.

The founders did not leave us many clearer examples of that principle than this one. They were presented with a chance to place a living president on the nation’s money. They refused in the first coinage law, and later generations wrote a formal ban on living persons into the rules for paper currency.

For much of our history the most powerful people in the country kept their own faces off the money while they were alive, and modern notes have been limited to the dead. The absence was the achievement.

The empty space where the president’s portrait might have been was itself a republican symbol.

A bill created to celebrate that tradition would reverse it.

You can have the anniversary or you can have the face. Not both.