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By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

“I waited and waited and waited, and I said, ‘The hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honor.’ Next year, we’ll honor Trump, OK?”

— President Donald Trump, who is now also the chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, using the announcement last week of its newest honorees to complain that he hasn’t been accorded that distinction — yet.

Maybe Trump was joking, but I think he’s on to something. I really do.

I say we give him one of the Kennedy Center Honors. And after that, the Nobel Peace Prize, his lusting for which almost certainly factored into his meeting with Vladimir Putin. And then, well, there’s no end to the accolades we could bestow on him, the trinkets we could throw at him, the trumpets we could blow for him, if we think creatively enough. Just as there’s no limit to his need for validation, veneration, feting, festooning.

We can’t wish away his vanity any more than we can take the wetness out of water. So why not work with it?

If we keep him busy with award ceremonies and bury him in gleaming trophies, glittering medallions and gaudily framed certificates, he might not be so free or feel so compelled to assert his dominance in other ways, such as stripping poor people of their health insurance, immigrants of their humanity, the judiciary of its integrity, academia of its autonomy, Democrats of winnable congressional districts and America of democracy. A megalomaniac has only so much time and energy, especially at his age — though he looks a good 50 years younger than 79. That’s the kind of thing we must tell him constantly and invent a prize for; besides which, whoever recorded the date that he entered this world was clearly a Trump-hating partisan who fudged the numbers to make him look bad. Everybody knows that birth certificates are rigged!

We give Trump an Emmy. That’s a no-brainer. Roughly two decades ago, he was actually nominated for that award, multiple times, as an executive producer of “The Apprentice.” And he was somewhat less than gracious about watching “The Amazing Race” be repeatedly crowned the best reality TV program instead. He mocked the ceremony on Twitter through the Obama years and was still raw about his absent Emmy during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Should have gotten it,” he grumbled.

We remedy that with a lifetime achievement Emmy, because he has been a television spectacle in so many ways for such a long time. In fact, he has done more than provide countless hours of television content — he’s TV’s most worshipful acolyte and devoted evangelist. It’s his god, for Nielsen’s sake. His entire political agenda is prompted by what he sees on TV. Or by how it will play on TV. He picks aides based on how they’ll look on TV. I hate to break this to Pete Hegseth, but managerial prowess and military genius aren’t how he landed defense secretary. Likewise, Pam Bondi didn’t ride her legal acumen to attorney general.

Of course, once we’ve given Trump an Emmy, he’ll also want a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, so he can join the rarefied ranks of artists who’ve run that golden gamut and are known as EGOT royalty. We can just fast-track the president on alphabetical grounds. Much as he redefines reality, we can redefine the acronym, and from now on, EGOT will also stand for Trump’s most prominent attribute affixed to his last initial.

It’s not much of a stretch to present him with a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. While it’s currently reserved for brainiacs under 40, such norms are for chumps, not Trumps, and matter less than the singular brilliance of this president, whose novel formula for calculating trade imbalances and tariffs captivated economists.

His analysis of election margins was equally innovative. In 2016, he converted the slenderest of triumphs in the Electoral College and a sizable loss of the popular vote into proof of “a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen,” in the words of his own inauguration speech. (Is there a Nobel for self-congratulation?) Four years later, he transformed defeat in both arenas into fulminations about a wrongly and cruelly denied victory.

Just this month, he brandished lavishly capitalized Truth Social posts,........

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