Donald Trump’s July 13 visit to Windsor Castle hit some turbulence. He’d been invited to join Queen Elizabeth’s ceremonial inspection of the Coldstream Guards, and all he had to do was walk this way, as he must’ve heard Steven Tyler advise at some point in his life. The Queen, in her cornflower-blue brocade coat and matching hat, walked at a pace suitable for a 92-year-old. Trump plowed ahead of her and then abruptly stopped, which cut off her path, forcing her to sidestep around him like he was a tiki totem pole.

Walking ahead of the Queen is not great statesmanship. Neither is failing to bow upon introduction (although few Americans expect their president to bow to anyone but Vladimir Putin). Trump managed to tick off the British public in just 60 minutes at the castle, but he also seemed distracted by the guards and their big hats, comporting himself, as one royal commentator described, as if “wandering up and down a golf course.” To me, his look seemed one of rumination, most likely caused by his stymied attempts to get a military parade in the nation’s capital for the Fourth of July.

In February, Trump let it be known that he wanted to top the Bastille Day parade he had watched while visiting French President Emmanuel Macron last year. “The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France,” a military official told the Washington Post. According to the Post, Pentagon officials said that shipping tanks and military hardware into Washington could cost millions of dollars, and that they were unsure how to pay for it. The last time the United States put on a grand military spectacle was back in 1991, when troops celebrated victory in the first Gulf War.

The spectacle of having the biggest and the best of anything might be Trump’s top priority as a Homo sapiens, but what he seemed to be lacking at Windsor Castle was some formal and lavish but strictly regimented spectacle of his own. With Trump, we tend to focus on the lying, the corruption, the racism, and the outright stupidity, but his obsession with physical order is always front and center. This is not surprising: shoe trees have been a dictator’s best friend from Hitler to Imelda Marcos. And Trump was voted “most tidy” by his military school classmates. He compulsively sanitizes his hands and was forever rating both TV shows and women’s bodies in beauty pageants.

I’m sure Trump knows about the Queen’s annual blowout the second week in June, the Trooping the Colour,performed by regiments of the Household Division to celebrate the sovereign’s birthday. The parade for the Queen’s review features foot guards, mounted troops, military bands, and often fireworks and RAF flyovers. Perhaps Trump was wandering the golf course of his mind searching for a reviewing stand with throne where he could inspect endless shows put on primarily for him, rating their orderliness and precision.

People say that Trump wants to be a king. In cartoons, a king sits on a throne with a crown, but even the modern British royalty wear costumes. There are crowns, jewels, and protocols for specific ceremonies and events, but there is a costume in everything they put on. What makes people commoners is their mutability. A king or a queen, in contrast, is always representing, and many a successful dictator has done the same. Hitler in his Bauhaus-styled Bismark fantasia, Stalin and Mao in their Communist mishmash of jackets and smocks (smackets?). Even though Trump dislikes the military, he is like his generals in always being suited up. We immediately recognize his heaving profile in the dealmaker’s Brioni as if it were something out of Asterix.

Trump is a notably unfit golfer with a sloppy profile, the antithesis of elegance. And the golf links are the antithesis of a place where he might ever be exalted. But he is obsessed with being there because he knows the fairways are surrounded by cameras. He wants us to watch him golfing while rich, to see him from a distance being driven around in a golf cart. It is an intentional performance, his attempt to approximate the way royalty is studiously observed by commoners from afar. He seems to know that his conveyance by golf cart suggests the litters carrying Chinese emperors or the Middle Eastern sedan chairs for imperial Western overlords. The networks’ endless videos of his lugubrious, inert body being carted about makes me think of that majestic scene of a caravan proceeding in front of a stone monolith in A Passage to India (1984). The white British women are seated atop a painted elephant and under a large umbrella, followed by a retinue of Indians on foot carrying food and furniture for their picnic excursion. I’m sure Trump would approve of this impeccable snapshot of 1920s colonial order where everyone knows their place.

Like dictators seeking blood-and-soil legitimacy, Trump craves the fearlessly gilded look of the old—esthetic symbols of wealth and majesty. (You can’t really count the royals here; they do not have a choice on gilded.) When he opened the doors of Trump Tower in 1983, the Donald had the guards at the base-level shopping mall dress like English beefeaters by way of Gilbert and Sullivan. Two years later, he found his own Windsor Castle with Mar-a-Lago, the 17-acre former estate of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the General Foods heiress. He pulled a classic Trump after his initial offer of $15 million was rejected: he bought just the beachfront property and threatened to build to obstruct Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view. He ended up buying the home for only $5 million, plus an additional $3 million for the antiques and furniture.

The Post Mar-a-Lago was built in 1927 with a raised land terrace to remove from view the unsightly place where the property abuts the road (later a highway). Trump had the landscaping changed, not because he wanted to see the highway but because he wanted drivers to see Mar-a-Lago. Why have a castle if it cannot be seen? That’s also why you make your a 118-room castle a member-paying private club, which he did a decade after purchase. (Or maybe you do that because multiple bankruptcies have left you broke.)

Trump’s castle came complete with 16th-century Flemish tapestries that Mrs. Post had protected from light but Trump allowed to fade by keeping the drapes open during the hours of blazing sunlight. Mrs. Post had paneled the library with centuries-old British oak and filled it with rare first-editions that no one named Trump ever read. Every castle needs its library portrait even when the owner has turned the library into a bar. Trump didn’t have to look far to find an artist in Ralph Wolfe Cowan, a Palm Beach fixture since the 1950s who often self-commissioned portraits of celebrities, heads of state, and other monied people.

As a teenager, Cowan began copying the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and launched a career of painting oil portraits from photographs. His portraits of Tony Curtis, Johnny Mathis, and other fine-looking men resemble pulp paperback covers from the forties and fifties. All of his men—Reagan, JFK, Elvis—look years younger and pounds thinner than their age in the copied photo, with tanned skin and faces so much aglow they seem slathered in baby oil. In fact, many of Cowen’s paintings look like his idealized version of his younger self. Everyone seems to belong to the Palm Beach jet set.

Trump didn’t have to look far for art because Cowan came to him first, showing Trump some sketches he’d made of the businessman right after the Mar-a-Lago purchase became known. They eventually negotiated a price 60% lower than what Cowan normally charges. The 1989 result, titled The Visionary, imagines a younger and much fitter Trump in tennis whites, his oil-slick face sunburnt to the hue of the Breccia Perniche marble that covers the walls and floors of the Trump Tower atrium. In 1983, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised this “absolutely exquisite color that is best described as a mixture of rose and peach and orange” that “gives off a glow of happy, if self-satisfied, affluence.”

I can’t help wondering what element of Cowan’s Trump portrait was drawn from the old masters the artist professed to love. The courtly leaning could suggest a coronation portrait . . . perhaps of the 23-year-old King George III—the loser of all thirteen colonies—painted by Allan Ramsay in 1762. But the pose also bears a striking resemblance to old commercial artist-drawn newspaper ads for men’s slacks. Behind the painting’s Breccia Perniche-faced Trump is an old-mastery Breccia Perniche sky, where rays of sunlight emerge from the clouds like the blast of a high-pressure showerhead. Anthony Senecal, Mar-a-Lago’s longtime butler, told the New York Times in reference to the portrait: “I’ve been in other homes in Palm Beach—same exact painting. Just a different head.” A photo in Town and Country magazine shows Cowan standing next to his un-commissioned portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and he’s wearing the exact tennis sweater ensemble that he put Trump in for posterity.

It was Cowan’s choice to leave the lower left of The Visionary unfinished, including Trump’s left hand and leg. Perhaps he was channeling Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 painting of George Washington, about 60% of which the artist left finished. (Stuart had completed the head and neck, but instead of covering the rest of the canvas, he made many replicas to capitalize on Washington’s fame. His painting was the model for the engraving that would be used on the one-dollar bill.) Trump, however, wanted that corner finished. He asked Cowan, “How much would you charge to fix the hand?” Cowan agreed to paint the corner for a small fee and a membership to Mar-a-Lago.

The story of Trump’s portrait is intriguing in what it says about celebrity vanity and those who prey upon it. Imagining Trump and Cowen negotiating “art”—the grifter being grifted by the griftee—somehow makes me think of The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film about a delusional fame-seeker obsessed with a talk show host. The idea for the screenplay came from the autograph hunters who stalk celebrities and live on the periphery of fame. Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a would-be standup comic who spends his days in his mother’s basement fantasizing about being as famous as the talk show host Jerry Langford. As someone unable to make real social connections, Rupert can only summon our pity and contempt, especially when his obsession takes a violent turn. Jerry Lewis’s Jerry Langford is a real person who sees the emptiness and loneliness of celebrity but can never leave that world. He is physically worn down by the compulsive excess and entitlement of his fans.

Rupert wants to be Jerry Langford, to take Jerry’s place in the public eye but as himself. He has to have somebody’s place to take because he can’t think up or perform anything de novo. He doesn’t want the satisfaction of mastery in any endeavor; he doesn’t want to think of the ugly grind. He only wants the glow of fame. One thing that links the film to Trump is Rupert’s obsession with his own name. In a scene with a bored girlfriend, Rupert shows her his book of celebrity autographs and asks her to guess the one he’s pointing at. “The more scribbled the name,” he says of his own signature, “the bigger the fame.” Trump the steamroller would seem worlds apart from this guy who lives within his daydreams. But the post-bankruptcy Trump ended up sticking his name on other people’s buildings all over the world, things he had nothing to do with. It doesn’t even bother him if the price is right. “A guy can get anything he wants as long as he pays the price,” Rupert says of his goal of being the King of Comedy.

De Niro’s character is strangely like Trump in another way. Rupert is 34 in 1981, the year the movie was filmed and the Eddie Murphy era of Saturday Night Live. And yet Rupert wants to be a Jerry Lewis era comedian, someone from the Rat pack years. Trump is a year or so younger than De Niro and Scorsese, but Trump also had the tastes and habits of men a generation older than himself. Roy Cohn’s generation, in fact—The Sweet Smell of Success generation. Even the primary color red that is Trump’s hallmark is from that red carpet generation (and incidentally all over Scorsese’s film). Trump had no use for the introspection of the Scorsese generation of artists in 1980s New York. But New York is where you find the fame, the fans, and the television and celebrity culture—the very world Trump wanted to conquer.

You have to wonder what Trump thinks of real royalty, 100% born into it. He has spent most of his life taking and spending other people’s money so that he could be treated like born-into-it royalty. He spent a lifetime lowering the bar of behavior not just to get himself into higher places but to hack into existing mythology to make it amenable to his deficiencies. “Myths try to explain why things are as they are,” Claude Lévi‐Strauss told the New York Times in 1972, “but unlike science, they try to account for everything at once, forming a sort of logical matrix that takes account of cosmology, sociology, meteorology, technique and geography.” However reprehensible Trump’s intent, it was ceaseless mythmaking work for the would-be king. And you can’t deny how successful he’s been at willing his fantasy self into being, especially since whatever he developed with borrowed money benefitted only himself and his ambition-devoid children. Given all the money that passed through his various enterprises, there was nothing he gave back to the economy let alone society. Unlike the Queen’s royal “we” that means everyone, Trump reduces everyone to the singular “me.” At least that’s how he’s treated at his Mar-a-Lago castle. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Senecal, the butler, told the Times. And one thing we all know is that Trump does not want his lifelong fantasy to stop with the hired people at the gates. §