On June 17, President Trump capped off his trip to Europe with a lavish dinner at the Palace of Versailles. The president seemed almost giddy at the prospect, saying how pleased he was by French President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation. As Trump explained, Versailles was “not gold leaf” but the “real deal.”
He called it “a beautiful palace, maybe the most beautiful of all."
Washington, D.C., beware. One can only imagine the ideas that his Versailles experience will inspire in America’s builder-in-chief.
Recall that in 2017, he came back from an earlier trip to France, having witnessed an impressive Bastille Day parade. Soon thereafter, the president decided to hold a similar parade in our capital city.
By now, there can be no doubt that our president loves the grandeur of monarchies and aristocratic regimes and that he is determined to imitate it in every way he can. The most telling of those modes of imitation is revealed in his architectural ambitions.
Dinners come and go. Parades end. But buildings and monuments endure.
Those fighting to preserve American democracy need to speak out against the president’s monumental ambitions. Congress needs to resist using public funds to satisfy the president’s private ambitions and to hold accountable officials who aid and abet what some see as his illegal plan.
And if neither works, the time will come when the people have to make sure that they are taken down.
Taking down statues or changing the names on buildings to erase a shameful past may not always be the right thing to do. But after Trump has left the scene, America will have to undo the architectural damage he is inflicting on America’s democratic landscape.
Trump’s fetish for architecture that glorifies him is incompatible with the spirit of democratic politics. That spirit is modest, restrained, and self-reflective.
Leaders honor that spirit by embracing humility and treating their time in office as a chance to serve the people, not to create tributes to themselves. Trump is turning all that on its head.
We may not be able to rebuild that spirit of humility until we take down what Trump builds.
We should have learned that lesson at the start of the Republic when the American people clamored to pay architectural tribute to our first president. George Washington would have none of it.
He told Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the architect who developed the plan for Washington, DC, that he did not want a statue of himself included in it. It was only 85 years after his death that a monument in his honor was completed.
Like Washington, Abraham Lincoln had no interest in being turned into an icon. It took decades after his death for the Lincoln Memorial to be completed.
At its dedication in 1922, President Warren Harding said, “(T)he true measure of Lincoln is in his place today in the heart of American citizenship, though more than half a century has passed since his colossal service and his martyrdom. In every moment of peril, in every hour of discouragement, whenever the clouds gather, there is the image of Lincoln to rivet our hopes and to renew our faith.”
“Abraham Lincoln,” Harding added, “was no superman. Like the great Washington, whose monumental shaft towers nearby as a fit companion to the memorial we dedicate today, the two testifying the grateful love of all Americans to founder and savior—like Washington, Lincoln was a very natural human being, with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity….Lincoln was modest, but he was sure of himself, and always greatly simple. Therein was his appeal to the confidence of his country.”
Since Lincoln, no president has embodied such modesty more than Harry Truman, the nation’s thirty- third president. Truman, who came to the Oval Office after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, referred to himself as an “old man who - by accident became President of the United States.”
I wonder what he would think about what is going on in Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C. However, we describe it, when he leaves the scene, he will leave behind monuments to himself that will remind us of this imperial moment in American history.
Among other things will be a gargantuan White House ballroom, the president’s picture on passports, and, if all goes according to plan, a 250-foot arch lurking over the approach to Arlington Cemetery.
As Vanderbilt University’s Kate Kamenstein notes, “The arch’s enormous size dwarfs that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (which it is modeled after), as well as the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Capitol Building.”
“It will be the tallest arch in any of the world’s capital cities.”
The idea for the Arch was born on an earlier trip to Paris, when Trump visited the Arc de Triomphe in Paris…” As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post describes it, “the design is a hodgepodge of borrowed elements.”
“The 250-foot height,” he suggests, “is left over from an earlier idea that the monument would honor the 250th anniversary of American independence…. It will technically be in the District of Columbia, but on the southern side of the Potomac River, disrupting the symbolism of Arlington Memorial Bridge, which was part of a grand symbolic design that honored post-Civil War reconciliation.”
And President Trump is not shy about revealing its purpose. He says that the arch is intended to honor him.
Such grandiose self-promotion is destructive to democracy, and the arch, if it is built, will be an open wound in our body politic. It resembles what Saddam Hussein did during his dictatorial rule in Iraq or what North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung did when he built the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang.
Trump’s trip to Versailles will reinforce his desire to imitate them by imbuing his ego into Washington’s built environment.
Just as Ronald Reagan famously called on Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, to “tear down” the Berlin wall, history may call on Americans to take down what Kennicott rightly calls a “monstrous monument to power, war, and one man’s ego.”
As President Harding said at the Lincoln Memorial, in a democracy our leaders are “neither supermen nor demi-gods… “ In such a society, Harding pointed out, monuments should only be built as a token of the people’s “gratitude, love and appreciation…”
Trump may have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that lesson. The rest of us should not.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
