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Hey everyone,
We got a great scoop at The Bulwark today that I wanted to share with you. Well, it’s actually two stories.
The first is that the Trump administration is plastering the president’s face on what should be a piece of patriotic Americana—in this case, U.S. passports. It’s coming as part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. It’s yet another case of the president putting his name, signature, and likeness on anything he can.
The other story is how the administration treated the story—and us—when we reported on it. We had two independent sources telling us about the new passport design. We had pictures of it. And we did the right thing and asked the State Department and the White House for comment. The State Department asked for more time—the White House turned around and handed the story to Fox News (or at least they tried to, but without all the details we have).
This is why it’s so important to have independent media. We’re not doing favors for the administration. We’re reporting the news.
Help spread the word by sharing this story.
EXCLUSIVE: State Dept. Finalizing Plan to Put Trump Picture on U.S. Passports
The new design would mark yet another U.S. government property upon which the president has plastered his likeness.
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THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS CLOSE TO FINALIZING a radical redesign of the U.S. passport to include a picture of President Donald Trump, The Bulwark has learned from two sources with knowledge of the redesign, including one who shared images currently under consideration.
The redesign is ostensibly part of a larger celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence. It comes as the Treasury Department prepares to produce coins featuring Trump’s image—both a controversial $1 coin in general circulation¹ and an “as large as possible” commemorative gold coin—and as the National Park Service emblazons Trump’s face on its park passes. Both of those redesigns were justified as being part of the 250th anniversary celebration.
According to the images of the passport redesign provided to The Bulwark, the inside cover of the new State Department-issued document will feature a scowling Trump—taken from his second inaugural portrait—superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, as well as the president’s signature in gold.
A more traditional patriotic image—a detail from the John Trumbull painting Declaration of Independence—is reserved for the back cover.
Images of the new passport were shared with The Bulwark on condition that it not publish them. According to the source, a government official who provided The Bulwark with color photographs of the redesign, the State Department is planning a “limited run” of 25,000 Trump-emblazoned passports. As of now, according to the source, the new design is still awaiting approval.
The Bulwark reached out to both the State Department and the White House this morning with a request for comment. A State Department spokesperson asked us for deadline extension as they were “looking into” the inquiry. We gave them an additional two hours. In that time, Fox News published an “exclusive” on the new passport design. A White House spokesperson then sent us an email response confirming the new design “on background” with a link to the Fox News story.
The potential redesign comes as President Trump has aggressively pushed for the Save America Act, which would require proof of citizenship—including a passport—before voters could cast a ballot.
According to Edward Kolla, a professor at Georgetown University and an expert on the history of passports, the decision to include the image of the president on the passport is “wacky.” No modern U.S. passport has featured the image of a sitting president, and no foreign passport has featured “the head of state of any country,” Kolla said. While passports used to bear the signatures of the officials in whose name they were issued, American passports are issued in the name the secretary of state, not the president.
The current passport design, in use since 2021, features on the inside cover a depiction of Francis Scott Key observing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814, along with the closing lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “O say does that star / spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free / & the home of the brave?”
The back cover of the current passport features an image of the Earth, the moon, and the Voyager spacecraft, along with a quote from the nineteenth-century author and activist Anna Julia Cooper: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”