Treasury Secretary Brandon Beach shares on Oct. 3, 2025, images of a proposed commemorative coin that the Trump administration wants as part of its effort to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America's founding.

Nobel or not, President Donald J. Trump has a legacy on his mind.

The announcement that he brokered a deal that could end the brutal two-year war between Israel and Hamas "will bring us close to the end of this 3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE," he wrote on Truth Social − the sort of achievement that presidents seek and history remembers.

And his triumphant trip to Egypt and Israel, likely to take place over the weekend, would share attention with the announcement in Oslo Oct. 10 of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he has publicly sought.

The 45th and 47th president has already announced the site of his presidential library − beating No. 46 Joe Biden on that − and begun raising millions of dollars for it. Even before the announcement that Hamas would release its remaining Israeli hostages, the next step in a long peace process, he was bragging that he had settled seven wars, although some of those combatants dispute his account.

At 79 years old, Trump even occasionally muses about hopes for the ultimate post-presidential achievement − that is, to get into heaven. (Those ruminations have prompted the White House to deny any health concerns.)

"I want to be good because you want to prove to God you're good so you go to that next step, right?" he told reporters in the Oval Office Oct. 6 when he was asked about the administration's "America Prays" initiative for the nation's 250th birthday next year. "So that's very important to me. I think it's really, very important."

Call it the Second-Term Syndrome, when presidents know the end of their tenure is closer than the beginning. That can sharpen their focus on what the history books are going to say about them.

As the end of Bill Clinton's second term approached, he worked furiously for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, but not even a high-profile summit at Camp David was enough to resolve differences over the status of Jerusalem. After Richard Nixon's second term was cut short by resignation, he spent much of the remaining two decades of his life trying to rebuild his presidential reputation.

But Trump's focus on his legacy has happened earlier than others and in more public ways.

Not every president has sought to shape the long view of history. George H.W. Bush didn't even write the traditional post-presidential memoir, a decision his son and successor George W. Bush attributed to a lifelong abhorrence to what his mother labeled braggadocio.

George W. Bush never wrote one, either.

From a dollar coin to Mount Rushmore, Trump's visage

There's no word yet from Trump on plans for a memoir, a successor to "The Art of the Deal," but he isn't waiting to move out of the White House to try to shape history's judgment of his time there.

  • The Nobel Peace Prize? "I deserve it, but they will never give it to me," Trump said in February during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu later became one of a string of foreign leaders who announced they were nominating Trump.
  • His face on Mount Rushmore? He disputed a New York Times story that the White House had reached out to Kristi Noem, then the South Dakota governor and now secretary of Homeland Security, about the possibility, calling it "Fake News." But he added that it "sounds like a good idea to me!" (Note: National Park Service officials have cautioned that there was no more "carvable rock" at the monument.)
  • His fist-pumping image on U.S. currency? The Treasury Department is considering minting new $1 coins bearing Trump's profile on one side and the defiant image after an assassination attempt on the other. One hurdle: an 1866 law that bars using the image of someone who is still alive.

From skyscrapers to ballrooms, Trump thinks big.

He and his defenders portray his presidency as the heroic rescue of a country that had gone completely off course. "American carnage," he called it in his first inaugural address, in 2017. The close-call assassination attempt in 2024 prompted him and some of his followers to see God's hand in his astounding survival.

In September, the news release announcing his library would be located at Miami Dade College said it would be "the greatest presidential library ever built, honoring the greatest President our nation has known."

Trump's opponents see it differently, describing his unprecedented expansion of presidential powers and what they say is his disregard for judicial and other norms as a threat to American democracy itself.

"When I hear not just our current president but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents 'vermin,' enemies who need to be 'targeted,' that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we're going to have to grapple with, all of us," former President Barack Obama said in September at the Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The nation's first Black president said the United States he no longer leads was going through a "political crisis."

From the Truman Balcony to the Trump Ballroom

When it comes to Trump's legacy, there's one thing on which both sides agree: It's going to be big, and it's likely to be lasting, even when a Democratic successor presumably tries to unravel some of it.

Now under construction is what will almost certainly be known as the Trump Ballroom, joining the Truman Balcony as White House construction projects that memorialize the presidents who ordered them built. Work on the gilded 90,000-square-foot structure hasn't been stopped during the government shutdown because the $200 million cost is being paid for with private donations.

Ahead next year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a celebration the White House also sees as an opportunity to cheer the current resident of the White House.

That big military parade in June that marked the Army's birthday, and his own? Consider it just the start.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nobel Prize, Mideast peace, and heaven. Trump's lame-duck musings have legacy on his mind

Reporting by Susan Page, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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