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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.