I was thinking damnatio memoriae myself. Keep the portraits, but tear his face off of them. Leave a scarred marble surface on the Kennedy Center facade where his name once was as a reminder of his disgrace. Tear the letters off his hotel buildings and leave them looking like that bank on the old main drag that you can clearly tell used to be a Pizza Hut. Turn Mar-a-Lago into a Spirit Halloween. Rebuild the East Wing as a memorial to those who suffered and died needlessly because of him and make it a sacred and shameful place like Auschwitz is today.
No plaque, please, and cover the scars with more marble. I do have a few suggestions for sites that should be named after him, though:
The Donald J. Trump Nuclear Dump
The Donald J. Trump Pestilence Pavilion
The Donald J. Trump Memorial Cesspool*
The Donald J. Rump Center for Hemorrhoid Research
A simple plaque in the White House like other presidents have, without any insulting comments or drawing devil horns on his portrait would show the kind of class that Trump so sorely lacks.
The next especially loathsome insect to be discovered could be named Revolticus trumpiae, or some such.
He’s a traitor and a tyrant and a mass murderer-by-proxy - and it hasn’t even been a full year yet. He’s not merely a lesser president with no class. He deserves no portait.
Why should he be allowed to scar the surface of our national treasure? Stick to scarring his hotels and golf courses.
We didn’t appropriately shame the losers of the Civil War and that’s a big part of the reason we’re in the mess we are now. Future generations need to be reminded of the damage that an amoral populist can do to our republic.
Are you in favor of the death penalty? Because that’s what would have been done with leading confederates if shaming the losers was the focus.
A more plausible-to-me reason we are in our current mess is century-long failure to enforce the 15th amendment (Black voting rights). This created a tradition of right wing governance in southern states.
Also plausible is that the failure of reconstruction has zip to do with 21st century nativism.
Well, yes. The Confederates got off easy compared to the Nazi leadership.
Part and parcel of the same thing. Our failure to make good on Reconstruction was this country’s second original sin and lead to a century of Jim Crow, then the Southern Strategy, Reagan, Gingrich, and the gradual transformation of the Republican party into Confederate revanchists whose dream of a white Protestant ethno-theocracy is closer than ever to coming true under Trump.
I don’t think a scar in which Trump’s name can be detected is a reminder of the damage he’s done. It says, “We tried to erase him, but look, he’s still here.”
I’m pretty sure that the expertise exists to patch over the damage done by that abominable lettering when the Kennedy Center reverts to its proper name. The stupidity involved here is just mind-boggling. Trump is so pathologically narcissistic that he actually thinks the name change will persist after he’s no longer president. No, it won’t. History respects the legacy of President Kennedy. History will piss on Trump’s grave.
Kind of like the law that Congress passed saying that the name of institution was the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” and that it could not be changed?
In all seriousness, I expect there will be a wholesale cleanup after Trump is gone—including removing his name from everything he has plastered it on, along with changes limiting the power of the executive. Trump is serving as a great example that the norms we have relied upon up to this point are all but useless.
Some wanted this to happen in 2021-22. But realistically a Congress and Administration would not be too eager to do that, thinking how things can easily flip every 2 years.
…
While at it, look out for the next must-pass-or-shutdown situation to include proposed rider amendments perpetuating Trump branding, elevating his EO’s to law, etc.
