Knocking down mounuments to his own magnificence

Donald Trump’s second term is going to end up being in large part about his edifice complex:

At a political rally Friday in Rockland County, N.Y., Mr. Trump boasted about the recent victories in Republican primaries in which challengers he backed took out incumbent lawmakers who had crossed him.

“We knocked out a bad senator from Louisiana,” Mr. Trump said to cheers. “We knocked out everybody,” he added.

Left unsaid was that Mr. Trump needed the votes of the Republicans he opposed.

Ms. Binder said she took Mr. Trump at his word when he argued last year that he had little further use for Congress, a suggestion that he could enact most of his agenda by circumventing lawmakers. She said that the president was thinking in larger terms about continuing to control the G.O.P. after his presidency, and what kind of legacy, historically and physically, he could leave behind. She pointed to his push to build a triumphal arch in Washington.

“He’s focused on the arch. I think he’s focused on his own personal legacy. He’s focused on vengeance,” she said. “He doesn’t have a legislative agenda, so does he really need a Republican Senate?”

Apparently some galaxy-brained law school graduates have come up with the idea that some monumental project that Congress authorized 120 years ago but was never built can be treated as legislative authorization for Trump’s Triumphal Arch to Stupidity. This of course is just one of many such schemes, including the billion-dollar ballroom, the new and improved reflecting pool, the remodeled Kennedy Center and Eisenhower Building, and some other stuff I have no desire to recall about the man who is a stain on the whole nation.

Which brings up the following prematurely anti-fascist question: What should the policy of Democratic presidential and other candidates be towards all this stuff, especially in 2028? I was looking at what Spain did post-Franco, and the answer is, remove all monuments to the Franco regime that could be removed as a practical matter, and repurpose those that couldn’t to memorialize something else, such as all the victims of the civil war as opposed to the glories of the Falange. This seems like a good model as a general matter, as does the push to remove all monuments to the confederacy, as delayed and incomplete as that has been in Confederate Jesusland.

I realize this isn’t the most pressing issue on the agenda — getting into a position to be able to do it is — but I think it’s worth mentioning, since, assuming various can openers, it’s going to be a real issue soon. And of course as always two separate questions are, what should be done as a matter of principle (bulldoze and dynamite everything immediately), and what policy should be pursued as a matter of pragmatic politics, in a nation where about 35% of the population pretty much continues to worship their god-emperor, even as he becomes more unhinged and ridiculous.