April 28, 2026
First it was coins, and now it’s U.S. passports.
The State Department has just announced, to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, President Trump’s face on limited-edition U.S. passports. This, of course, comes after the U.S. Mint announced his face would also appear on not one but two officially minted $1 commemorative coins.
This is the mock-up the State Department released today. You can see Donald Trump’s face right there on the inside cover sheet, along with his signature in gold and the Declaration of Independence behind him. The back cover of the commemorative U.S. passports will feature an American flag with “250” centered between the 13 stars featured on the 1777 version of the flag.
These limited-edition passports will be available this summer for anyone who applies for a new passport, pending availability.
Now, the first question: have we ever seen anything like this before? Absolutely not. No president of the United States has put his own face on a U.S. passport like this before. Normally, only national symbols appear on the passport.
Second question: can Trump do this? Who gets to decide? Well, according to the law dating back to 1926 and amended several times after that, the secretary of state and the State Department get to decide everything when it comes to U.S. passports. That includes not only who gets to qualify for a U.S. passport or whose passport is taken away, but also includes the form, content, security features, and even design. So it’s up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to approve this. No board or independent authorization is needed from any other governing body, including Congress. The law gives the secretary of state wide latitude to do what he wants, and it’s likely, given Secretary Rubio’s close ties to President Trump, that he would approve a design like this.
For the record, the last time we had a passport redesign was in 2021, when the State Department announced it was going to release what it called the Next Generation passport. That was a redesign that was only focused on security upgrades. Those changes included an embedded data chip, a laser-cut passport number, all with a special protective coating. But those were security upgrades, not artwork upgrades.
Here’s the post from State department.
