It’s a kind of kleptocratic abuse expressed through architecture. My name, my mark, is going on that building, and if not I’ll knock it down, says Trump of the Kennedy Center, even though the building genuinely isn’t his to rename, let alone demolish. It’s mine, and if I can’t have it, can’t control it, I’ll destroy it.
All part of the truly weird, truly disturbing spectacle of America’s edifices of veneration to the Republic, to its war dead, being so comprehensively molested by this man and his cabal. Concreting over the Rose Garden. Locating this Speer-esque Arch of Trumph in a way to obstruct and obscure the country’s Arlington military cemetery, fitting Trump’s disdain for the nation’s war dead. The unsanctioned demolition of the East Wing to build this ballroom with a bunker (why?). Having a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn, its participants trash talk in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Let alone the speed and extent to which the Oval Office and beyond has become plastered with these stick-on gold mouldings. Even I find the optics of all of this painful, and I am not American,
How diseased a mind is his was already well borne out back on 9/11, with his realisation that the pay off of the destruction of the World Trade Center was less about thousands dead, trauma and war, but that his building was now the tallest in New York. Viewing truly global-epoch-creating slaughter and trauma through the prism of phallus envy.
Washington DC and Pyongyang
What is extraordinary about Washington DC as a city is the singularity of design, per the scale of the layout and positioning of its state buildings, the ideals of the Republic built in architectural form on the scale of the City on a Hill. Pyongyang, funnily enough, is in on a similar scale and layout as a city-size presentation of all that was and is important to the North Korean state, the Korean Workers’ Party, and the man, Kim Il Sung, who founded it … but who then had it remoulded around himself, about himself. Trump’s efforts to immortalise himself, to be so deified, are of the same monomaniacal vein.
But Pyongyang was rebuilt from the ashes of mass war, a war within Koreans, and high explosives delivered by the US. Trump leads an America being brought to war with itself, by himself. Kim laid to rest his war comrades high on the hill overlooking the city for all to see their sacrifice, didn’t obscure it like Cadet Bonespurs with Arlington. Kim built the Juche Tower per what he thought was the towering power of his philosophy. Trump’s efforts are just ejaculations of gold bought with taxpayers’ money.
The agenda
For that, Trump was always too ignorant, and his mind now is far too addled, for any of the current onslaught on America’s monuments and venerable edifices, its hallowed grounds of mourning, to be his idea. Because it is the architectural front (and brilliant distraction) of an agenda meant not just to destroy the Republic in its most basic physical form by desecrating and demolishing its buildings, lawlessly, but to destroy the morale of any and every supporter of American democracy, this is the viciously in-yer-face ‘Why? Because f*** you, that’s why’ approach of Project 2025 manifest through the drawing board. Even if they are hauled from office, the damage will takes years, years and years, at great cost amid an ocean of debts, to rectify and restore. Which is also the point.
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