Toward the end of a recent piece in The New Republic, progressive commentator Greg Sargent offered a modest proposal regarding President Trump’s kitschy, gargantuan White House ballroom: Democratic presidential candidates should promise “to convert it into a monument to American democracy—and all the struggles that have been fought on its behalf.”
Well, allow me to retort: tear it down—tear it all down, each and every last monument and institution Trump defaces and defiles as he attempts to remake our nation’s capital in his own tacky image. We must, in other words, do to Trump and his megalomaniacal designs what the ancient Romans did to the unstable and theatrical emperor Nero: efface and erase the any and all marks that disgraced and disastrous political leader left on the imperial capital.
After the great fire of 64 CE razed vast swathes of Rome, Nero built an opulent palace—the Domus Aurea, or Golden House—and an enormous bronze statue of himself on the city’s ruins. Rome’s political and military elites turned on their tyrannical and self-absorbed emperor four years later, prompting Nero to flee the capital and then commit suicide. Nero’s eventual successors literally buried the Domus Aurea and rebranded Nero’s massive bronze as the sun god Sol, a colossus that bestowed the informal title Colosseum on the immense public amphitheater constructed over and in place of Nero’s gilded residence.
To undo Trump’s desecration of our own national capital, then, America should resurrect the ancient and venerable tradition of damnatio memoriae—and rid its national capital of all of Trump’s vain monstrosities.
It will prove simpler and easier to do so in some cases more than others. Stripping Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute for Peace, for instance, ought not take much effort or money—what went up without much fuss can come down without much fuss. And what was done without authorization can be undone without authorization.
Other defilements like Trump’s paving over of the White House Rose Garden and showy renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall will involve a bit more work to undo. Concrete will need to be ripped out and flowers planted to restore the Rose Garden, and the lurid blue paint job Trump mandated for the Reflecting Pool will need to be scraped away. Unlike removing Trump’s name from various buildings, it’ll probably cost millions of dollars to undo this physical damage and rebuild what Trump actively destroyed.
Matters become even more involved when it comes to Trump’s billion-dollar White House ballroom and the grotesque triumphal arch that would block the sightline from Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial. Presuming these garish structures ever actually get built—hardly a safe assumption given their constantly shifting and incoherent designs, in addition to lawsuits that could drag out construction until the end of Trump’s term in office—they will need to be outright demolished or, if only partly completed, dismantled. Again, what was done without much in the way of formal authorization or permission can and should be undone without it.
And if Trump’s successor goes ahead and dismantles Trump’s monuments to himself, there will undoubtedly be howls of protest—and not just from MAGA remnants but members of the supposedly neutral political media as well. Many of these complaints will likely be in bad faith, others merely misplaced and misguided. Either way, they need to be ignored if we are to undo Trump’s desecration of our nation’s capital. A certain ruthlessness, or at least a supreme indifference to the opinions of the chattering classes, will be required to execute this program of reconstruction.
If we’re ever going to move past the low, dishonest age of Trump, though, we will need to take definitive action against his ongoing campaign to debase and defile—to say nothing of defraud—our nation. That can and should start with undoing Trump’s effort to deface Washington, perhaps the most visible outward expression of the wider and deeper corruption he has foisted on our nation and its public life over the past decade. This symbolic reconstruction cannot repair the profound moral, political, and substantive crises Trump has inflicted on the United States on its own, of course, but it must go hand in hand with the far more difficult struggle to answer them.
Still, we’ve got to start somewhere, and the nation’s capital is as good a place as any other. Pulling down Trump’s monuments to his own ego is no distraction but the leading edge of any real attempt to rebuild democracy in America moving forward.