Pity the Poor Passport
What are we to make of the promised new American passport? And what was wrong, one might ask, with the old one? Though nearly half of all U.S. citizens seem never to have held, or even applied for a passport, the border crossers among us hold on to ours as a prize—one that is deeply treasured and symbolic of something profoundly positive in the national character. Bearing an alarmingly stark, almost Avedonian portrait of the holder—as the great Erma Bombeck remarked, “When you look like your passport picture, it’s time to go home”—it also offered a simple, eloquent old-fashioned advisement to the world: “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance.” A plain and peaceable statement—a request, not a threat, and urging, as veterans of the interminable immigration lines at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle fervently desire, merely an end to needless delay.
An American passport has, for generations, been not just a peaceable visa but a kind of holy grail—a thing valued above all other official documents. Nabokov, the most elegant of refugees, writes of the “miserable” Nansen passport—a makeshift document issued to “stateless persons” between the First and Second World Wars—that made him feel like a criminal, until he obtained an American one, in 1945. The Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel carried his U.S. passport with him everywhere he went, so essential was it to the restoration of his soul. (The hideous experience of being stateless, without papers or a home, was so deeply incised on his psyche that, he said, he clutched his heart whenever he passed through even the most benign of customs offices.) So, seeing the passport as one more item melted in the crucible of self-aggrandizement and nationalism that constitutes the world image of the Trump Administration is alarming, no matter how small the ultimate effects may prove to be.
The changes, which are expected to take effect in 2028, were introduced by the current inhabitant of the role of Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a bizarre presentation on September 29th, which mixed elements of an Apple product launch with those of a high-school-civics pageant. On the cover of the new passport, Rubio announced, the words “United States of America” will be larger and “exactly where they belong: first, right on top.” The Great Seal, featuring a bald eagle will also be bigger and “more gold.” The passport pages themselves will contain scenes from American history: the Wright Brothers making their glider fly at Kitty Hawk, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and even the March on Washington. Yet the passport will also have—and one had to hear this twice before one could believe it once—a “flip-book” effect, so that an eagle will appear to fly over those scenes. Rubio mentioned that, in airports, American-passport holders will be able to amuse themselves with the flip-book effect—“It’s either this or some Game Boy for your kids,” he said—while, presumably, the citizens of other, lesser nations in some shivering 5 A.M. customs line will look over with envy at the ease with which Americans are entertained.
Who thought up the flip-book effect? Surely the infantile nature of it seems designed to appeal to one figure and one figure alone, which leads to an ambiguity left open during Rubio’s presentation. As everyone knows, the State Department recently issued a limited-edition passport for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which features a belligerent-looking Donald Trump on the inside cover. (The image resembles another historic first, a Presidential mug shot, which was taken when Trump surrendered to authorities in a Fulton County jail, on charges connected to the short-lived but well-founded Georgia case against his attempted interference in the 2020 vote count.) This “Patriot Passport”—the name itself recalls the rhetoric of authoritarian tyrannies—is available only by special appointment at the Washington Passport Agency, though, if you have the bad luck to need to request an emergency passport there, you get one automatically.
The idea that a sitting President would put a picture of himself on his country’s passport is an act of pure self-aggrandizement that runs counter to every American instinct since the birth of the country. Will Trump’s portrait persist, as a non-optional image, on the new passport? Although the inclusion of a permanent Presidential portrait in the passport wasn’t explicitly guaranteed in the presentation—not even as a nonpartisan feature, so that, say, a President A.O.C. might one day beam from its pages—it might be. A sharp-eyed journalist noted that, toward the end of Rubio’s presentation, an image of the inside cover of the new passport appeared with Trump’s face clearly imprinted on it. It would seem to be beyond the bounds of propriety to sneak the Presidential portrait into the new passport and then cry out in defensive outrage when citizens protest, but anyone who thinks that that’s beyond the shamelessness of the Trump regime has not been paying attention to the history of the past two years—or, for that matter, the past ten.
As so often during this mad time, one has to return to first principles that were previously thought to be in no need of defense or definition. The President is not a substitute tyrant or king, whose face, like that of the monarch of England (the enemy in the historic event celebrated this year), appears on currency, coins, and postage stamps, but just one more citizen who happens to have been handed a very big job. As that leftist provocateur Ronald Reagan once said, “You don’t become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.” Reagan would no more have thought of putting his picture on the passport than of taking off his jacket in the Oval Office. His acolytes did fight hard to have things named after him once he left office—a weird obsession, perhaps, but one well within the premises of democratic government. Having an airport where the flights famously run well behind the promised time named after you seems like an odd reward, but, if you want to have at the naming game, have at it.
New York City bridges and tunnels are constantly being renamed after politicians: for Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln, F.D.R., R.F.K.—the original R.F.K., that is—and Ed Koch, and the day will doubtless come when New Yorkers will take the Mamdani Expressway. But the politicians those structures are named after are—significant detail—dead. That has always been the essence of the arrangement. You do the job, you leave the job, and history—meaning the consensus of the citizens who come after—will rate the job you did and maybe honor you for it. The slain J.F.K., for instance, was, some will remember, honored by actually having a concert hall in Washington named after him. It’s a fallible system, certainly, but a genial one.
Putting your face on the passport, like forcing your name onto another President’s memorial, is a symptom of tyrannical egotism, exactly opposite to the republican premise. But does it matter? The blunderbuss of violations of the basic decorum and dignity of democracy have become such a daily matter that the increasingly familiar response is to sigh and surrender. Let him put his picture on the passport! Compared with so much else—people shot by ICE agents and detained in detention facilities, or Haitians who trusted the United States to be a good guarantor of their safety being sent back to the anarchy of their island—it seems trivial. For that matter, one might argue that putting the new passport ahead of the genuinely anti-American vision of foreign policy sketched by Rubio in a speech, last week, at the Athenian Acropolis, may seem misplaced. Rubio offered a vision of a “Western” tradition that was not only wildly ahistorical—the suggestion of a continuity of civilization from ancient Greece to Christian Europe overlooks such details as the fact that Christians defaced and mutilated the statues on the Parthenon, before which Rubio stood—but also wildly anti-American in its suspicion of aliens and immigrants. One might almost call it wildly hypocritical, coming from a son of Cuban refugees whose good life in the United States is possible only because of this nation’s long tradition of welcoming refugees and exiles, and giving them passports when they became citizens.
Yet one cannot blithe the image issue quite so easily. A constitution and a democracy live not just by policies pursued but by symbols enshrined. We live, here in New York, in a labyrinth of symbols that sum up our lives and our beliefs, from the Statue of Liberty to the General Grant National Memorial, and each of these things finds a fine and modest form that suits its subject. The absence of a living monarch on our money, or on our travel documents, was not an accident haphazardly arrived at but a declaration of equality meant to be flourished and displayed. In this way, a reasonable case can be made that the constant volley of insults to the dignity of our democracy is as grave as the bad policy choices: policy choices can change; the decorum of democracy, once defaced, can never be wholly restored. So, pity the poor passport! To see it so reduced by the whims of a would-be autocrat at the soothing of a cynical sycophant undermines our faith not just in free travel but in freedom itself. A U.S. passport should bear the image and the imprint of no officeholder of any kind; it should merely let us pass on our journey through the world freely and without hindrance, just as the old one does. ♦