The president's grand plans for the nation's capital aren't just personal monuments. They are rooted in erasure

[marmar]

The dark purpose behind Trump’s Washington makeover
The president's grand plans for the nation's capital aren't just personal monuments. They are rooted in erasure

By Jason Kyle Howard
Senior Ideas Editor
Published May 7, 2026 9:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) When I was an undergraduate student at The George Washington University in the early 2000s, I used to take a couple of textbooks and trek down 23rd Street — past the Watergate and the Kennedy Center in the distance on my right, and the State Department complex on my left — to the Lincoln Memorial. I had a study spot I considered my own that offered a respite from university life, as well as a reminder of the weight of history surrounding me in the city I was learning to call home. Reaching the memorial’s terrace after climbing the small mountain of steps, I would bypass the temple housing Daniel Chester French’s famous statue of the 16th president and walk along the colonnade until I reached the quiet rear, where most Washington tourists never think to venture. There, I’d sling my backpack to the ground and, reclining into one of the large grooves in the monument’s columns, I’d read and study for hours, with the Potomac River and Memorial Bridge as my personal vista. In the distance, across the river in Virginia, was Arlington National Cemetery, and when the gloaming fell, I could see the flicker of the eternal flame marking the graves of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, with Arlington House illuminated by floodlights on the slope above.

Now, each time I read about or see plans for the president’s proposed triumphal arch, which would stand in a traffic circle that marks the end of the bridge and the beginning of the cemetery’s formal entrance, I think of that view and how it could soon be no more. Plans for the arch were preliminarily approved in mid-April by Trump devotees who sit on the Commission of Fine Arts. The graves of America’s fallen soldiers will be obstructed, the eternal flame blocked — and from the cemetery, the majestic view of the Lincoln Memorial obscured — by a 250-feet monument. To Donald Trump.

....(snip)....

Knowing his history of branding and licensing his surname, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But there is something else beyond self-memorialization that undergirds Trump’s plans not just for the arch but also for his remake of Washington itself — an architecture of erasure that seeks to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.

....(snip)....

Short of extinguishing the eternal flame altogether, there is nothing worse that Trump could have done to erase the presence of Kennedy and the era he represents. His presidency, while short and largely unrealized, nonetheless seeded much of the transformative legislation and social programs that defined the 1960s and the rest of the American century — and continue to be felt today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal segregation in public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory tests and, at least until the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, provided for fair representation of Black voters; the War on Poverty, which sought to eliminate poverty through job training, community development and education — all of these initiatives and more had roots in the Kennedy presidency and were fully brought to life under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/07/the-dark-purpose-behind-trumps-washington-makeover/

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[justaprogressive]

3. ..and Rec

[Whip-poor-will]

4. NO

When the tapes are finally released and trump part in the parties is shown his name and monuments will be erased and torn down.

[usonian]

5. Fascists gotta rewrite history to "legitimize" their lies and atrocities.

Emmanuel Goldstein, "THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM" in the novel "1984"

https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practice-of-oligarchical-collectivism-annotated

PDF:

https://dn721904.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-theory-and-practice-of-oligarchical-collectivism_202408/THE%20THEORY%20AND%20PRACTICE%20OF%20OLIGARCHICAL%20COLLECTIVISM.pdf

In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that FREE had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and ROOK.
...

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten.

A crass ass gotta erase class.

[Irish_Dem]

6. Tump/Putin must destroy anything that made America great.

It is heartbreaking.