Putting your name on money transfers to buttress or appropriate authority in times of crisis is very much a Medieval Thingᵀᴹ. Offa gave the pope dinars signed with his name to get some of the great standing of Arabic coinage. It's an old trick.

Those two examples are of course not directly comparable, but the political economy of power behind them is. Such tricks might fool some but to any historian they are immediately transparent. Overstriking coinage with your name is a common symbolic resource generation strategy.

You usually do it to generate symbolic capital from the bottom up, i.e. you appropriate the more powerful coinage (or the more commonly accepted). It says a lot about the insecurity of Trump's position. But to see it you actually need to work on those pesky "premodern" times.

One can write a whole piece about it, but the examples are numerous. And to be honest you have to go all the way back to the coins issued by the Roman emperors which apart from the economic aspect were also very important tools of imperial propaganda.

I guess the takeaway from this story is: more historians to contextualise current political developments *and* the coverage of those developments. Not because those developments are *like* the past but because the past makes it easier to understand them.