Barely a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social the phrase “Long live the king.” Soon after, the White House’s official X account amplified the message with an AI-generated image of Trump crowned, standing against the skyline of New York City. It was the kind of imperial fantasy that commentators have long anticipated: Trump as monarch, Trump as tyrant, Trump as American Caesar.
The gesture inadvertently recalls something that happened almost exactly eighty years ago, when another American also seized a crown that was not his. A month before Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, a division of the U.S. Army was making its way to Siegen, a small city near Cologne. They were the “Monuments Men”— the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit—tasked with hunting down and recovering all the stuff that the Nazis had looted and hidden in underground caverns across Europe.
Siegen’s mine, long abandoned by coal workers and now an unwitting sanctuary of stolen treasures, was rumored to hold something more than soot and bat droppings. As the Allied bombs turned the Ruhr Valley into a blazing inferno, museum curators and church custodians had spirited away masterpieces deep in the earth. Inside the squalid mine the manuscript of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony rested alongside paintings by Old Masters and Impressionists. Squirreled away were also some of Aachen Cathedral’s most sacred treasures: the silver bust of Charlemagne, the golden reliquaries, miniature shrines, and a copy of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force declared its discovery as the most significant cache of looted art found in all of Germany.
This strange moment of cultural recovery is memorialized by a photograph of Private First Class Ivan Babcock, all of 29 years old. He stands there, heavy bags under his eyes but smiling broadly, with a cigarette drooping from his fingers, a crown perched casually on his head. The rings on his fingers and the bracelet on his wrist pale in comparison to the crown’s jewel encrusted glitter.
This was not Charlemagne’s Aachen, heartland of the Holy Roman Empire; this is a half-lit bunker in the fading days of the war. And the crown was not original, but rather a replica commissioned in 1915 for Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had sought to desperately bolster his claim as Charlemagne's legitimate successor.
For French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the simulacrum is not merely a copy of reality but an image that redefines it. This photograph, then, is a double simulacrum: a copy of an imperial authority, captured in an instant, temporarily seized by a jesting pretender to the throne. It is a picture of conquest turned playful, the legend of chivalry reduced to a smirk. Babcock’s swagger marks a new superpower not yet fully aware of its place in the new world order. Eighty years later, this world has become old, and another new world struggles to be born.
The Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was used in coronations from the empire’s beginnings in the tenth century until its dissolution in 1806, shattered by the ambitions of Napoleon. During World War I, Wilhelm II created a replica as a propaganda tool to evoke Germany’s medieval and Christian roots. Hitler, too, attempted to link his self-proclaimed Third Reich to this lineage, imagining his regime as a direct successor of the Second Reich and, ultimately, to Rome itself. The actual crown spent the war in another bunker, beneath the Nuremberg imperial castle, a relic lying dormant, waiting for another myth.
The real crown of the Holy Roman Empire is now securely ensconced in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, alongside other disenchanted treasures: a narwhal tusk once believed to be a unicorn’s horn and an agate bowl once thought to be the Holy Grail. (Both were deemed to be the “inalienable heirlooms of the House of Austria.”) Today, the symbols of Charlemagne are claimed by the European and American far-right, which twists them into a fantasy of a “White Europe.” Translatio imperii—the medieval idea that the mantle of imperial power is handed down across epochs—never died; it just became fodder for a new generation.
Here, in this photograph, the duplicate crown is a prop in a moment of victorious bravado. The young soldier’s grin, his casual posture, his cigarette—all speak of an almost accidental triumph. The lowest rank in the infantry wearing the highest emblem of authority becomes the perfect metaphor for the precarious transfer of empire: Shakespeare once wrote, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” especially when it is borrowed.
More than two centuries after the demise of the last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, monarchy and its symbols seem to retain an allure that is hard to resist—even if in jest. And when such jokes come from a powerful president instead of a rank-and-file soldier, they can take on an altogether more sinister tone.