As his approval ratings sag, Trump is on a mission to burnish his legacy, according to his advisers.

Published on: Aug 29, 2026, 14:00:57 IST

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WASHINGTON—President Trump this week offered his 13 million Truth Social followers a blunt assessment of how he hopes history will remember him.

On Thursday, he posted an AI-generated image that ranked the U.S. presidents. Trump’s name was at the top of the list, above George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, with the words “The Greatest” emblazoned above his portrait.

As his approval ratings sag, Trump is on a mission to burnish his legacy, according to his advisers. But Republicans privately worry that Trump’s focus on himself is backfiring with voters, complicating their efforts to keep control of Congress and giving Democrats plenty of ammunition for attack ads.

Trump’s senior advisers have for months tried to shift the president’s focus to the economy, according to people familiar with the matter, in a bid to show voters that the president is focused on the issue they care about the most. While the president has touted his economic record in speeches and Oval Office events, his attention frequently shifts to other issues, from his construction projects to attacks on his perceived enemies.

Trump has seen firsthand how quickly a president’s policies can be wiped away by their successor, so he is trying to leave behind a legacy that will be more difficult to erase. He spends much of his time, according to those close to him, working on a growing list of construction projects, from the White House ballroom to a proposed triumphal arch, seeking to create physical reminders of his time in office. And he is putting his name and face on limited-edition passports, national park passes and a soon-to-be released commemorative $1 coin.

One senior administration official said the president has entered “legacy mode.” He is fixated on how he will be remembered by future generations, according to aides, conscious of avoiding the fate of past occupants of the White House he views as weak, such as Jimmy Carter.

“He is one of the handful of presidents who thinks on an entirely historic scale,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and current Trump confidant. “He wants to be consequential. He wants this to matter. He wants to be the kind of president who people say, you know, it mattered that he was president.”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump is “solely focused” on delivering prosperity and peace to the country. “The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before,” he said, adding that “when all is said and done, this president will undoubtedly go down as the most successful and consequential president in modern American history.”

Earlier this month, Trump showed off a new helipad that is being built on the White House’s South Lawn. The stone he selected, the president told reporters, would last for 1 million years.

Republicans, meanwhile, are concerned with more immediate matters. They face an uphill battle to maintain their congressional majorities and have urged him to turn his attention—and money—to the coming midterms.

A super PAC aligned with Trump has amassed a war chest totaling more than $400 million. But the group hasn’t yet started spending that money on a large scale, frustrating many in the president’s party.

It recently spent more than $800,000 on get-out-the-vote calls and text messages in support of Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who bested a GOP challenger in South Carolina earlier this week. Trump encouraged Graham to run to succeed her late brother, Lindsey Graham, and a loss in the state would have been an embarrassment for the president, who takes pride in the success of candidates he endorses.

Some Republicans privately groused that the group’s first significant spending in months was in a runoff between two Republicans in a state that Trump won in 2024 and that isn’t seen by either party as competitive in November.

Despite his low approval ratings, Trump plans to put himself at the center of the midterms, a move that will test whether his influence with voters is waning. As the president’s team debates how to spend MAGA Inc.’s enormous fundraising haul, Trump has told advisers that he wants to produce a series of television ads centered on his agenda, according to people familiar with the matter.

The president, according to his allies, is confident that the tax cuts he signed into law will resonate with voters. And he contends he is still the party’s most powerful political force, arguing he can motivate Republicans to show up in November’s elections.

To turn out the MAGA base ahead of the midterms, he urged his supporters during a Fox News interview this week to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Some Republicans worry that Trump isn’t concerned about the political blowback they could face from his actions. When Republican leadership struggled to build consensus around legislation he is pushing that would impose strict new voter-eligibility rules, a senior administration official said Trump didn’t care about how the debate would affect members running for re-election because he was focused on his long-term legacy.

His international rivalries have, at times, distracted from his domestic agenda. While Republicans were campaigning around the country this week, Trump was escalating his trade feud with Canada. The president called the press into the Oval Office this week for an executive-order signing. He directed the government to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

“Now picture the American voter who was on the sidelines Tuesday, arms folded, undecided about the midterms, who read that headline and thought, ‘Well, now I’m voting Republican,’” conservative talk-radio host Erick Erickson, who has increasingly criticized Trump in recent months, wrote on social media. “You cannot picture him because he does not exist.”

Trump faces significant political challenges. An unpopular war in the Middle East has put pressure on the U.S. economy, strained U.S. standing on the world stage and pulled down Trump’s poll numbers to historic lows. Republicans are now at risk of losing not just the House but also the Senate. The possibility of a third impeachment, if Democrats regain control of Congress, now haunts the White House.

“He chose his legacy, and it’s the war with Iran, the fall of the American empire, and the destruction of the U.S. economy,” said Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who campaigned in support of a second Trump term and regularly advised Trump up until they broke over the war.

That Trump is thinking about his postpresidency legacy at all marks a notable shift.

Aides avoided broaching the topic of a presidential library during his time out of office because they believed it signaled the end of his power and feared it would upset Trump. He now talks openly of his plans to build a library, the latest sign of a president contemplating life after the White House.

One aide to the president said Trump has become a reader of presidential biographies in his second term. He hand-selected the portraits of his predecessors and edited the plaques that accompany them in what he calls the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” a new exhibit that lines the White House colonnade.

Ronald Reagan is remembered for winning the Cold War. In place of a portrait of Joe Biden, there is a photograph of an autopen and a plaque claiming that Trump’s immediate predecessor “was, by far, the worst president in American history.”

The entry for Trump offers an early forecast of how he sees his own legacy. “At his Inauguration, President Trump announced the beginning of the ‘Golden Age of America,’” the president wrote of himself, “and he delivered.”

Write to Philip Wegmann at philip.wegmann@wsj.com and Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com

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