I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"
But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul.
"We work beneath the earth and above it, under a roof and in the rain, with the spade, the pickaxe and the crowbar. We carry huge sacks of cement, lay bricks, put down rails, spread gravel, trample the earth... We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization," to quote Tadeusz Borowski (Vedder trans.)
I am reminded as well of Émile Zola's depiction of the French Second Empire in his novel The Kill (La Curée). Louis Napoleon's regime too was obsessed with urban redevelopment and construction projects (though he, in fairness, was much better at it than Trump, and didn't waste as much time prosecuting innocent civilians on bogus allegations of vandalism in order to cover up for his own management failures). Zola in his novel portrays this aspect of Napoleon III's reign as yet another tactic for bulldozing the French working class and erasing any memory of the betrayed republic of 1848—thereby paving over as well the evidence of the regime's own crimes.
Every despotic regime, it would seem, has had this same compulsion to bury the memory of whatever came before it and to erect arrogant monuments—cast in its own hideous image—to some "new, monstrous civilization" in its place. Trump's proposed "Triumphal Arch" and all the other gaudy building projects are just the latest in this well-worn path of dictators and tyrants past. (As is, perhaps, his compulsion to rename bodies of water.) As Maggie Haberman put it in a recent interview: "It’s a legacy thing," for Trump; "[...] It’s: What am I leaving behind so the world can’t kick me off the world[.]" It's "Ozymandias" all over again.
And with the Supreme Court now eliminating many potential challenges to these projects on standing grounds, by seemingly tossing out the former doctrine of aesthetic injury, we may have no real legal means to stop it!
But perhaps we should let him build, and let the wreckage he leaves behind stand as his own indictment before history. As Ernest Crosby wrote, in response to the proposed "Dewey Arch" commemorating the U.S.'s criminal invasion and occupation of the Philippines:
Build up your arch. Lay snowy stone on stone
To herald to the world your glittering pride
In foreign conquest. Lightly fling aside
That irksome creed of Liberty outgrown.
Let your new toys, your ships and guns, atone
For broken faith and precedent defied.
Proclaim your marble goddess far and wide
Freedom no more, but Might, and Might alone!
Nay, 'tis a whited sepulcher you raise,
Whereon shall this stern epitaph be read:
"Here at the silent parting of the ways
Fell Liberty, betrayed, beguiled, misled.
Pray for her, stranger, that in happier days
She may be raised immortal from the dead."
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