Trump’s Monuments to Himself

From the White House ballroom to the Kennedy Center to a proposed triumphal arch along the Potomac, President Trump has taken a special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy. We’ll look at how he’s largely escaped oversight, including by designating these projects as central to national security. Why are monuments such a priority for Trump, and what does this tell us about the growing reach of executive power?

Guests:

• Tom Nichols, staff writer, The Atlantic, professor emeritus of national security affairs, U.S. Naval War College
• Erin Thompson, professor of art crime, CUNY, author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum, I’m Mina Kim. Of all the things the president has on his plate — the war in Iran, high fuel and food prices, steep potential losses for his party in the midterms — what seems to animate Trump the most are his building projects. The latest announcement this week is that his proposed triumphal arch on D.C.’s Memorial Circle will now be a military complex, complete with snipers and drones for national security reasons. And for all the skepticism and unpopularity of the idea, it continues to move forward for now.

This hour, we look at how Trump’s construction projects are changing the landscape and the reach of executive power and the role of monuments in shaping a collective narrative. Starting us off is Tom Nichols, whose latest piece for The Atlantic is called “Trump’s Monumental Obsession.” Good to have you back, Tom.

Tom Nichols: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Mina Kim: So first, talk about why the idea of militarizing the arch has drawn fresh skepticism and pushback from not only you, but retired generals, preservationists, others.

Tom Nichols: Because it’s crazy. You’re talking about putting an arch in the middle of a busy traffic circle, and anybody who’s ever been to Washington has probably experienced that particular area between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and downtown D.C. And the idea of filling it with weapons while cars sit in traffic around it every day. And airplanes, by the way, this is another problem, as airplanes fly over it because it’s right in the approach path for Reagan National Airport. It’s a stupid and dangerous idea.

But I also don’t think that the president is serious about it. He’s saying this because he knows that national security arguments tend to prevail in court, as he did with the ballroom. When people sued to stop him from demolishing the East Wing and building the ballroom, some of his opponents won in court and there was a tussle back and forth. Then Trump said, no, this is a national security project. It’s to build a bunker and an operation center, and the ballroom is just a kind of a hat we’re putting on top of that national security stuff. The courts bought it. Supreme Court, all the way down, you know. Well, you know, the president gets his way on national security issues.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Why did the courts buy it? What does recasting the building project as military infrastructure and therefore a national security asset, right, help Trump do with the courts and with Congress as well?

Tom Nichols: The courts have always — I should say always since the end of World War II, since the Cold War, when national security became a thing, became a phrase. You know, before World War Two, very rare to actually see the phrase “national security” used anywhere. And during the Cold War, we created a national security state and we prioritized national security above a lot of things, including civil liberties. And we did it again after 9/11.

So when presidents invoke national security, courts kind of wrap that under the president’s Article II powers. And they become very hesitant to interfere with that because they don’t want to interfere with what they think is the president’s legitimate sphere of competence and power on that issue.

So it’s become a thing where presidents, not just Donald Trump, but presidents in the past, have said, well, to get through a policy I really want to get to, matter of national security. And that’s kind of meant to snuff out debate about whether the thing involved is actually important or worth the money or even legal. So that’s why it happens.

Mina Kim: This does also undermine Congress’s authority to constrain it at all in a substantive way.

Tom Nichols: Yeah, it always has. I mean, the national security argument has always been part of the shift, the migration in power from Congress to an imperial presidency. Presidents over the course of the Cold War and then during the war on terror, executive power has expanded vastly beyond what I think the founders envisioned in the Constitution.

But the president has become, you know, the vicar of national security, and it’s a very effective argument to make. And sometimes, you know — let’s be fair about this — sometimes it’s a legitimate argument. There are things that the executive branch has to do in the name of national security, like build bunkers under the White House.

But when that gets applied to things like tariffs, for example, you know, Trump at one point claimed that tariffs were a matter of national security. Pretty soon everything becomes a matter of national security because presidents, and this president in particular, just like the fact that it sort of, you know, just kind of shuts down opposition and legal challenges to whatever it is he wants to do.

Mina Kim: Yes. I mean, Trump argued that the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds was because they were a threat to our national security.

I want to invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have about President Trump’s militarized arch? You know, why do you think these construction projects are so important to the president? Do these things bother you? Why or why not?

You can tell us by emailing [email protected], finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.

Those are on Discord, right? “Trump’s building projects are a frustrating waste of money and grotesque display of ego. But honestly, I prioritize his D.C. monuments pretty low compared to other damage he’s doing to the country and world. Everything built can be disassembled.” Do you think that? The types of things he’s building now could easily be disassembled?

Tom Nichols: I think some of them can be. I personally, as a former Washington resident — I should say a former suburban resident. I used to work on the Hill and spent my graduate years at Georgetown and all that. I think that these are atrocious and garish projects, and I would happily support any president who says the ballroom’s got to go and we’re going to rebuild the East Wing and not put up an armed platform in the middle of, in front of Arlington Cemetery.

I think Donald Trump has proven one thing, that if you can put these things up through sheer willpower, a president can take them down through sheer willpower.

I think your listener, I agree with your listener who said, hey, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world except for two things, I would say. One is that Donald Trump is establishing that presidents can just spend money at will simply by chanting “national security” over even trivial and dumb things, like putting up this kind of, you know, bit of militaristic bombast.

I referred to the victory arch that he wants to put up as something that looks like it was found in the bottom desk drawer of, you know, Albert Speer’s desk. And it’s just ugly. But he can just build it because he’s — national security, and he snaps his fingers and people start digging.

So once you establish that, you’re setting a lot of bad precedents here.

The other is that I think symbolism matters. I think, I think, you know, the president, the White House in particular, is meant to be dignified and austere, but not bombastic and overwhelming. And I think it’s an affront to the culture of democracy to put up a Tsarist ballroom that would make a King Louis of France blush in the middle of the place that’s meant to be the people’s house.

So I, while it’s not the most important thing in the world, it’s more important than it may seem.

Mina Kim: Yeah, I know. And also I think in the context of all the other things that are happening in the country, as you point out in your piece and as I mentioned in the intro, I think it’s concerning to have that be the main focus of the president. Is there any chance at all that because he noted that it was at the military’s request, is there a chance at all, as someone who knows the military well, that he would have found people in the military to say, yes, this is something that could be meaningful for national security?

Tom Nichols: I would — this again, my personal view here is that I will file that under things that didn’t happen. He may well have turned to Pete Hegseth and said, Pete, maybe we should build a big arch. And he said, good idea, sir. And that was the source of saying the military has asked for it.

But I cannot imagine that, you know, anybody in the uniformed military was sitting around and saying, hey, you know what would really improve that arch? Snipers.

Is it possible in this administration? Again, he may have turned to some hapless colonel and said, Colonel, you think that’s a good idea, right? And the guy’s going to say, oh, whatever you think, Mr. President.

But I just don’t believe that people walked into his office and said, Mr. President, you got to build this armed platform right next to Reagan National. Uh… Because, you know, it’s a matter of national security. I, I just — it can — I could be wrong, but I just don’t believe that happened.

Mina Kim: You noted costs as well. Do you know who is paying for these monuments and what kind of cost we are looking at, or maybe costs across things like the arch and the ballroom?

Tom Nichols: I’m sorry. Are you insisting on transparency and how millions of dollars are being spent in Washington? That sounds like communism. I don’t know.

That’s another part of this problem. I mean, the president changes stories every other day on — you saw this with the ballroom. Well, it’s only going to cost this much and we’re going to get donations and it’s not going to be a big deal. And then the costs balloon and then it turns out we are using government money. Don’t hurt! But again, only for national security, because there’s going to be a thing under it.

In the end, the president — this is a personalized cult of personality regime inside the White House, where the president says, I want a victory arch. And a bunch of people look at each other and say, well, yes, okay. And we’ll figure out who’s paying for it and how all that’s going to happen later.

And if we had a Congress that cared about oversight… You would know. But because this Congress currently is controlled by a Republican majority that is mostly terrified of Trump because nobody wants to end up, you know, primaried like John Cornyn or, you know, Cassidy or Tom Tillis or any of these people that are leaving, they simply kind of keep their head down and they’re just waiting for this.

I mean, it’s been almost 10 years of some Republicans just waiting this to blow over, but obviously it’s not gonna blow over. And Trump’s gonna spend this money and nobody’s gonna really ask why.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s triumphal arch and his special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy and why neither Congress nor the courts right now have been able to end these projects, especially when the administration cites national security.

We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us.

I’m Mina Kim. Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, and other building projects that have drawn the president’s attention and how these construction projects are extending the reach of executive power, even if on the face of them they don’t seem as much of an issue for the country as, say, things like the war in Iran and high fuel and food prices.

We’re talking about this with Tom Nichols. With you, our listeners, join the conversation by emailing [email protected], finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

What questions do you have about the president’s efforts to push building projects through D.C.? Why do you think he wants to do this? And do they bother you? Why or why not? How do you think these projects will inform how we remember President Trump?

Let me go to caller Susan in Marin. Hi, Susan. Go ahead, you’re on.

Susan: I think, uh… I hold Congress as responsible for the ballroom as I hold Trump. Uh… They’re the part of our government that’s supposed to be able to spend money, and the fact that they’re allowing him to take money out of, uh… common bank is just, it just makes me furious. They’ve done nothing for an awful long time, and this is nothing that is going to cost us millions and millions and billions of money.

Mina Kim: Well, thanks for sharing how you feel about this, Susan. Let me go to Colin next in San Francisco. Colin, go ahead. You’re on.

Colin: Good morning. I’m not as concerned about the proposed, um, victory arch or Arc de Triomphe, whatever we want to call it, because it’s very unlikely that it will be completed within Trump’s lifetime. It’s likely going to be abandoned just as soon as he’s out of office.

The original Arc de Triomphe took about 30 years from, uh, inception under Napoleon Bonaparte to completion in 1836. Um, it’s also my, you know, it could jinx this country too. You know, after the Arch of Triumph was built, the Germans were able to stage two victory parades in 1871 and 1940 under or by the arch.

Mina Kim: Well, thanks for sharing where you’re at and what you think in terms of jinxing. That’s an interesting point.

I do want to bring Erin Thompson into the conversation now, professor of art crime at City University, New York, and also the author of the book Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. Erin, thanks so much for being with us.

Erin Thompson: Happy to be here.

Mina Kim: So stepping back a bit, you know, help us understand the power of monuments as people sort of grapple with how significant this moment is with regards to Trump. How could they affect us generally, the public?

Erin Thompson: Well, monuments are really about capturing the future. They’re about shaping the memory of the past. So I think it will be very difficult to get rid of any monuments, really, but Trump’s monuments in particular, and they’re going to keep shaping what we value about America. So it…

Mina Kim: It’s interesting that you say they have that type of power because they feel, you know, sort of very limiting in some ways of sending a message. Can you talk about how or where their power lies? I guess maybe even in their simplicity.

Erin Thompson: Exactly. Monuments don’t actually teach history. There’s not enough space for that. They just tell us who should you literally look up to, who is large, who should be honored and hold power.

Mina Kim: Say there’s a certain power in the way we sort of get used to them, how they fade into the background. How so?

Erin Thompson: Yeah, their power is in their boringness. We accept them, we take them for granted. Something like 90% of the public monuments in the U.S. honor white men, for example. So that constant message about who deserves to hold power in the U.S., I think, has a continuing effect.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Tom, you know, Trump was quoted as saying, out of the 59 top cities and capitals, Washington, D.C. is the only one in the world that does not have a triumphal arch. And you were noting earlier, you that sort of Americans have a certain dislike of those kinds of things, or generally does not do this in our capitals for, for good reason. What are those reasons?

Tom Nichols: Well, for one, we tend to celebrate the citizen soldier, the people among us who fought and died, which is why our war memorials, especially in the modern era, tend to be more muted.

You do have some big monuments that came after the Civil War to the Union. There’s one in New York, there’s actually very few of them in Boston, but a lot of statues. But by and large, Americans view going to war as something they’ve been dragged into. One of my late colleagues used to call it the avenging angel syndrome that, well, you know, by God, we didn’t start this thing, but we’ll get in there and finish it.

And then we kind of come home and realize that, you know, war takes a toll on a democracy. So we don’t build these Napoleonic arches. We don’t build these, you know, Germany, these these kind of Nazi, you know, winged angels or Soviet, you know, the big Soviet Mother of Russia with the sword and the shield and all that stuff. We were just not that kind of culture.

So when Trump says, you know, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t have one of these things, that’s, I think, the right answer to that is that’s right. And that’s good. And that one of the things that’s good about America, that we don’t do that.

But Trump is very much — you can see it in his taste, which is vulgar and deeply affected by the grandeur that he sees in other cities. And he thinks that this makes America and him somehow less of a player, less majestic on the world scene not to have one of these big arteries.

And I always think of what your caller, your most recent caller, said. You know, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been a mixed blessing. It was meant to honor the French victory in the Battle of Austerlitz in a war that eventually Napoleon lost and ended up exiled and dead for conducting.

So maybe it’s not a good thing to put these things up. Maybe things like the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and others are much more thoughtful and much more in line with the American character.

Mina Kim: I think listener Eric would agree with you in terms of taste. Eric writes, “Trump uses emergency when there is none. He breaks the law faster than the law can apply remedies. Also, he has horrible taste in design.”

Erin, I understand you recently visited D.C. and tried to visit many of the locations that President Trump is trying to change or build. What did you notice about the aesthetic?

Erin Thompson: Well, first that they’re even worse in person. So the $5 million have recently been spent on re-gilding four statues on the Arlington Memorial Bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. And they now look like they should be unwrapped and have chocolate inside. They’re so shiny and ridiculous looking.

And it was also a no-bid contract, his favorite form of using government money. But much more disturbing to me was the fact that so little was visible. There is a giant fence around the White House and Lafayette Park, which is a public space, preventing you from seeing where the East Wing used to be, where the construction is.

And so I agree in a way that monuments are not the most important things, but I think they’re the gilded canary in the coal mine. And if he’s able to hide what he’s doing with these construction projects, what else is he not telling us?

Mina Kim: Hmm. Well, let me go to caller Charlotte next in Menlo Park. Charlotte, go ahead.

Charlotte: Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the program. Uh… I’ve wanted to just chime in about it, actually, just that that’s what, uh… And she said just now about the White House. I have very strong feelings of love of the monuments of Washington, D.C., and, uh… I am wondering, can people actually still fit at the White House the way that they could before, or what it — what is the policy? Is it — has it changed? Are people banned from even visiting anymore?

Mina Kim: Hmm, Erin?

Erin Thompson: Thanks, Charlotte. I think it’s been greatly reduced. It is still, in theory, available, but Lafayette Park, for example, which is a popular pedestrian place to see the White House, is now closed more and more frequently. And the Trump administration has just proposed putting up a permanent fence to replace the janky-looking tarp construction they’ve got happening now.

Mina Kim: Erin, what do you think is the overall message of this? We did a show on aesthetics in the past when Trump was sort of adorning the Oval Office with gold and so on. So this combination of sort of a gilded and what I think you’re describing feels like a gilded fortress.

Erin Thompson: Exactly. And another reason that D.C. hasn’t had a triumphal arch is that those arches celebrate a single leader. That’s not democracy. It’s a little less aesthetically unified to have monuments celebrating a whole host of people, but that’s what we need to do in a democracy.

What the redesign of D.C. is doing is suggesting to visitors for potentially generations to come that power should be and is concentrated in the hands of the few or even one person, and that wealth should be the requirement of power. Whereas that is something that since the very beginnings of official congressional, national, federal arts has been fought against.

Mina Kim: Well, I think this on Discord is echoing some of your points. The listener writes, “This is a symptom of a weak and vulnerable form of government that can be so easily taken over by one person. One person has corrupted all three branches of government. The power and self-interest of those around him have allowed Trump to seemingly do whatever he wants without meaningful challenges or accountability. He doesn’t ask permission. His reign ends in two years. But what does this say about the future of democracy?”

Tom, do you want to weigh in on that too?

Tom Nichols: Yeah, I think people should beware talking about the flaws of the system when what we’re really talking about are the flaws in the American people.

James Madison warned us during the debate on ratifying the Constitution. He was asked, you know, will these checks and balances really work? Are these institutions that you’re asking us here in Virginia — it was during the debate in Virginia — are these, you know, institutions really going to protect us in the you’re promising?

And Madison, I think with a certain amount of exasperation, said, none of these things work if we are not decent people. The way he put it, he said, “Is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation.”

That, I think, is part of what’s happening. The problem is not the design of the system, it’s not the Constitution or the branches of government. It’s that you have tens of millions of people who think this is okay, and some of them even think it’s more than okay. They like it, and they vote for it.

And I think that’s a problem with our society, that there’s a kind of decadence on we that’s overtaken our society where millions of people just shrug and say, well, he’s going to build a ballroom. What are you going to do?

And I think that in an earlier time — and when I say earlier, I don’t mean 100 years ago, I mean like 20 years ago, 15 years ago — any one of these things would have been the source of a huge outcry.

I think Donald Trump has, by firehosing us with these crazy projects and ideas and wars and other things that he’s been doing, has just kind of worn people down into numbness to say, well, I guess we’re going to build this drone platform with a big winged victory statue on it. And what can we do about it?

And that’s in part, again, because of the cowardice of his party, which now depends — the elected officials of his party depend on surviving primary challenges in which maybe 15 or 20% of the party votes. And that very small number of people has basically put a stranglehold on a party and on the legislature.

Now, hopefully that can change if people get mad enough and vote. But I guess I would just caution everyone against saying, well, somehow the design of this system is flawed. This system was never meant to work if people did not have some kind of civic affection and involvement in it. And that, I think, is the source of our real problem here.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Interestingly, you know, we had Sarah Longwell on not that long ago, and she seemed to think that this issue may actually be breaking through with some of his voters, just because the contrast is so stark, Tom, between Americans struggling, right, with economic pressures from the war, very much as a result of the war that he started, and these gilded statues and arches that he seems very fixated on.

Do you see that as actually being a place where maybe there will be pushback by the very electorate that has voted him in?

Tom Nichols: Yeah. And I think you’re seeing that happen. I mean, for Donald Trump to be hovering now around 30, 32% popularity is really quite remarkable considering that he came back into office. I won a discontinuous election and managed to ride back into office.

Sarah, I think Sarah’s right about this, and she of course is the one who has sat with hundreds of focus groups to hear it.

And I think what breaks through is not necessarily the monuments as an issue per se. I don’t think anybody’s gonna get out there and vote and say, you know, I really don’t like this ballroom. But they’re standing there at the gas pump saying, you know, I’m paying four and a half bucks, or if you’re a farmer or trucker or something, you say, I’m payin’ you know six and a huff bucks for diesel, and this guy is running around like Goldfinger, you know, painting everything in gold.

Who’s thinking about me, and why is he putting up gold statues and sticking gold appliques on everything when I can’t afford to keep filling my car to take my kids to school?

I think that has broken through. I think it’s been a really important part of the nosedive in his popularity. He really does come across as a callous, uncaring king who basically tells the people to eat cake and that expensive gas is a small price to pay for having a great president like him.

Mina Kim: Well, Lorraine writes, “The expense of all these projects is deeply offensive in view that he tore healthcare away from millions of Americans through his big ugly bill.”

Erin, can you think of a historical analog as well of a leader fixated on building monuments in the face of much more pressing problems?

Erin Thompson: Well, and I just want to say, too, that thousands of people came out last weekend to protest his threats to close the Kennedy Center. So he’s attacking what people love.

And yeah, looking at Trump’s actions now made me think of the Colosseum. Right? In Rome, it’s named the Coliseum after the Colossus, a gigantic statue that stood beside it that was — he was one of the worst rulers of all history and was obsessed with trying to beautify Rome because he saw what was coming. He wanted to fix his reputation and it did not work.

Mina Kim: He fiddled while Rome burned, right?

We’re talking with Erin Thompson, Professor of Art Crime at City University of New York, author of Smashing Statues, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic, about Trump’s focus on monuments and monuments, in many ways, to himself, the difficulties in curbing those actions by Congress and the courts, at least as they’re currently constituted, and what broader impact that has.

You can join the conversation, listeners, with your questions about his recent announcement of the militarized arch, which Tom Nichols wrote about, and also just how you feel about these construction projects. Do they matter to you? Do they bother you? Why or why not? What kinds of messages do you think they will send? And what would you like to see happen to them going forward, especially after the president’s presidency?

You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And Lorraine also writes, “Trump thinks that by splashing gold everywhere projects an image of wealth and power. The truth is an excess of gold makes those things look tawdry and cheap. As for the victory arch, where’s the victory? I hope I’m wrong, but the bunker under the ballroom combined with the militarization of the art paints a picture of a man who’s preparing to dig in after the 2028 election, if things don’t go his way.”

We’ll have more after the break. This is Forum.

Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s building projects, his monument, which he did say, in fact, that the triumphal arch early when he was announcing it was in honor of him.

“Trump’s Monumental Obsession” is the piece by Tom Nichols, our guest today, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Erin Thompson is author of Smashing Statues and professor of art crime at City University in New York.

And listeners, you’re joining the conversation with your questions about President Trump’s building projects, why you think he’s doing them and whether or not they bother you and why. 866-733-6786, the number. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram is where you can post your comments. You can also email [email protected].

And this listener on Discord writes, “What about this spending in the context of the total national debt? After all, DOGE’s purpose was to cut spending, right? How can the spending on these monuments be reconciled with that purpose?”

Erin, we talked with Tom earlier about whether or not we really have a good sense of how much these projects are costing. I mean, Trump once promised to finance the building of his own giant ballroom himself or with private donors as well. And I was struck by how you have noted that actually often the kinds of monuments we see across this country are not put up by state or federal governments, that they’re actually put up…

Erin Thompson: By private donors? Yes, we think of them as public monuments, but they’re not public in that the public has any say into what they look like or where they go or whether they should come down. Public monuments are usually only put up by those with enough power to find a place for them and enough money to pay for them.

Mina Kim: Yeah. So what does that then mean with regard to, you know, who gets to deliver whatever message they’re trying to deliver, as you were saying earlier, a monument does?

Erin Thompson: The history of monuments in the U.S. shows, at least I argue in my book, that they’re often meant to show the rest of us our place.

So, for example, a lot of Confederate memorials went up not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century and were often associated with interracial unionization efforts. So if people started to threaten to strike, a monument would be put up by, say, the mine owners or the factory owners to remind white workers, don’t cross the color line, to ally yourself with your fellow workers. You need to respect the work of your Confederate forefathers.

So I think that the autocratic monuments we’re seeing today are also meant to remind us as voters, as citizens, you know, just sit tight. Let the elite make the decisions for you.

Mina Kim: After the murder of George Floyd, though, suddenly all over the country, you start seeing monuments being taken down or graffitied. Why do you think that happened?

Erin Thompson: Well, that’s the power of monuments to make concrete intangible ideas about justice, equality, et cetera. So they were places to rally ourselves, to think about, to protest inequality and power. And they were in the news a lot, but only about 200 monuments left their pedestals after the murder of George Floyd, which is far, far less than 1% of the public monuments in the U.S., something like a tenth of a percent. And many of those were removed by official actions; only about 20 were taken down by protesters. So we still have a lot to think about.

Mina Kim: Yeah, they’re very hard to bring down, aren’t they? Can you talk about that and why?

Erin Thompson: Yeah, there’s the law. So in almost all former Confederate states, it’s simply impossible to remove an established public monument. They knew when they were especially putting those laws into place to protect Confederate monuments.

And even in states where there’s not an explicit prohibition, there’s just simply no procedure to follow to ask questions about a monument.

So part of what’s so infuriating about what the president is currently doing is that he’s ignoring all of these laws that future administrations might not be so willing to ignore, and thus it will become — it will be difficult to take down what he’s put up because we’ll be respecting laws that he is not.

Mina Kim: Yeah, you tell the story of an Indigenous activist in Minnesota who was trying to get a monument down. Can you talk about that and what ultimately he had to do?

Erin Thompson: So Mike Forcia, an Indigenous activist in St. Paul, Minnesota, had been trying for decades, his entire adult life, to question a monument of Christopher Columbus in front of the state capitol. He wanted to know, in this city, which is the largest urban population of Indigenous people in the U.S., why is a man who many blame with great reason for unleashing a genocide honored on the statehouse lawn?

But every time he filed a petition, it essentially ended up thrown away because there was no procedure to question that monument.

So finally, he heard that others were planning to tear down the statue during the middle of the night in August of 2020. And he decided that he was going to go out in the middle of the day, invite people to witness him because he said the monument went up in front of crowds of people and it needed to come down in the same way. And so he took responsibility for tearing down that monument.

Mina Kim: Ultimately, did he face jail time?

Erin Thompson: He was charged, and prosecutors agreed to divert his case to a special restorative justice process. So he, instead of going into a court, was put in front of talking circles, they called it, of people who were affected by the removal, but also people who are affected by this statue being there in the first place, and he was sentenced to community service.

And one of my favorite parts of this case is that he only had a rope from Home Depot that he threw around the statue and tugged it down, but it turns out it came down so easily because no one had bolted it to the pedestal. It was just assumed no one would ever question the erection of Columbus on top of that pedestal, so it was very easy in the end to topple it.

Mina Kim: Hmm. Well, let me go to Sasha in Berkeley next. Sasha, go ahead.

Sasha: Good morning. Well, I look at this as Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again after Trump is gone. And I’m curious why what I’m going to suggest next couldn’t be done.

I would take down all the gold in the White House and anywhere else that’s been plastered and melt it down for money we could put into the Treasury. And in terms of the art, take it down and the ballroom — if there is no need for a huge room like that, currently called the ballroom, I would take at least half of it down if the other half is to be made into useful offices or replace, I forget what it was, the East or the West Wing that he tore down.

You know, but the biggest problem is how do we put the government back together again? And I have no answers for that because clearly all of our departments have been stripped of staff, and what have they been replaced for, or what it remains are people with political agendas to destroy.

Mina Kim: Well, Sasha, thanks for weighing in.

Sasha: I’m curious about whether we can melt it all down or not.

Mina Kim: Well, we were hearing from Erin, you know, just what kinds of potential consequences you could face for that. I don’t know if you want to add anything to Sasha’s point.

Erin Thompson: Well, I’ll just say that I think that a lot of the stuff that got stuck up around the White House might not be actual gold, so melting it down might produce a lot of plastic fumes.

Mina Kim: That was a suspicion. Let me go to David in Indiana next. David, go ahead. You’re on.

David: Well, since, uh… arches tend to commemorate something specific, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern of Americans right now is affordability, maybe it should be named the Arch of Affordability, the Triumph of Affordability, or at least nicknamed that.

Mina Kim: Well, David, thanks. Yeah, if you can’t take it down, maybe you just reimagine and reconstitute its purpose. That could be one way to handle it.

So RJ writes, “How can judges be so gullible and not see through claims that these projects are for national security?”

I wanna ask you about this, Tom. What is the status of the legal challenge, right? What can you tell us about the arch in particular?

Tom Nichols: Well, there are lawsuits pending, but to your listener’s point, it’s not that judges are gullible. It’s that they don’t think they have the power to contradict the executive on what constitutes national security, which is why this keeps getting kicked up further and further because there are some judges that say, okay, fine, I’m not buying that argument.

But, you know, precedence, precedent and history tend to be on the side of presidents when they say national security. The courts basically say someone besides us has to adjudicate what the answer — usually be in Congress, since we don’t actually have a function in Congress right now.

So it’s not that the judges are gullible, it’s that I think some of them feel that their hands are tied.

And I wanted to make, if I could, I just wanna make a quick note about what monuments are for, because Erin’s point is very important. But I think it depends on where you live.

I lived and worked in Boston for years. And monuments can also be really important reminders about what’s good in us and what we should remember about ourselves.

If you walked from my old office in the State House on Beacon Hill, all the way down through the garden and the Boston Common and the Public Garden, you would pass a plaque, a sculpture dedicated to Robert Gould Shaw, for example, the commander of the Massachusetts 54th, the first Black Army unit. You go further down, you pass statues of abolitionists. You walk out of the Public Garden under the gaze of George Washington.

The problem is that Donald Trump is cheapening our notion of what a memorial is by taking them and basically admitting, as he did — he was interviewed last summer and basically someone said, are you putting these up because they’re afraid they won’t put them up for you when you’re gone? And he said, yeah, this is what I want. And no one will do this once I’m gone.

Well, in a democracy, if you’re saying, I want to put these up because no one wants them but me, that’s a really kind of revealing and dysfunctional thing.

So yes, it’s true that memorials can be these awful attempts to intimidate people. Trump’s efforts, by the way, remind me not of — although I think Colosseum is a great example — I spent a lot of time in the old Soviet Union, and his projects remind me of these outsized Soviet war memorials that were everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev and other places in the Old Soviet Union.

That’s just not the kind of country we are, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget how memorials can really inspire us and make us better people just by seeing them.

Mina Kim: Well, Barbara writes, “Trump builds these illegal monuments to himself because he knows others will not. They need to be torn down at the earliest opportunity. We cannot let these un-American monuments to a cruel, lawless, corrupt leader stand. Symbols matter.”

Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

What do you think — and I know I’m asking you to sort of get into the mind, but I imagine, Erin, you have some thoughts on this. Is the simplistic message he wants to send with these monuments to himself — what do you think he’s hoping people will associate with him? Wealth.

Erin Thompson: Our goodness. Yeah, it’s not too complicated, I think. And it has been the same in monuments throughout time. Bigger is better, is permanent.

And I think it’s interesting that we do tend to think of monuments as permanent, but they really aren’t. America is very strange in that we’ve had the same set of monuments for so long, but almost every other culture, country in the world has seen waves of monuments go up and down every time power changes.

So yeah, I think we should get used to the idea, thinking of our monuments as lovely but temporary.

Mina Kim: I think we think of them as so permanent just because of the way that they’re built, and like marble and stone. Yeah, that’s just — that’s why they’re so big, you can’t ignore them. Yeah, and you have to look up at them and so on.

Well, in the short term, can it serve the political purpose of distraction, say, from the things that he hasn’t been able to keep his promises on in this particular presidency? Erin or Tom. Yeah.

Tom Nichols: Oh, sorry. Yes, but I think it’s backfiring in the way that we discussed earlier.

If we were winning the war in Iran, and we are not, you could almost see people making an argument to say, well, we’ve toppled a terrible regime. We’ve been at each other’s throats for nearly a half century. And the people of Iran are going to be free. And who? You know, whatever argument you want to make, and therefore we should put up something.

The problem is that everything that he would want to commemorate, including himself — I mean, who puts up a monument to himself when he’s at 30%? You know, that’s the kind of, I suppose, grim and laughable part of this.

He’s losing war, the economy is tumbling off the rails, his party is about to be clobbered. Um, you know, in, in, um, at least by all indications that we can see so far, his party’s going to get obliterated in the midterms. His — he’s at historic, he’s reaching, he has fallen below, uh, what our friend Sarah Longwell calls the Bush line, the George W. Bush line. And he’s now heading for Nixon territory.

And you know who’s, who’s response to that is to say, you don’t — we need a memorial, a statue, a ballroom.

Um, and I think that’s the kind of shock that hits people. If things were going well, you would have a lot of people defending this or at least ignoring it. And instead he’s doing this at a time that I think a lot of ordinary Americans who don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the news are getting home from the grocery store and saying, you know, you’ve got to be kidding me. Well, what is this about?

And I think it is breaking through.

Mina Kim: Well, Gregory in Oakland writes, “I appreciate the point that it’s not just the system, but also the people who keep enabling this behavior from our leaders. These projects ultimately distract us from issues that matter even more.”

Trish writes, “He knows that nobody is going to honor him in such a grand manner once he’s out of the picture. So he has to honor himself given the atrocities that he and his administration have perpetrated upon the nation and the world. I suspect that one day there will be a move to tear down all of his creations just as we are doing nowadays for those who have been revealed for their atrocities.”

Trump’s name has been taken down for now from the Kennedy Center. Tom, can you just remind us of the status of all that? Because I know you’ve also recently reported on it.

Tom Nichols: Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, I think another place where people are starting to pay attention in a way that they didn’t before is looking at him and saying, with all the things going on in the world, he’s fixated on this, that he has to have his name next to Jack Kennedy for some reason, you know, in a city.

And I think we should also stipulate here what George — excuse me, Donald Trump hates Washington. I mean, it’s not a city where he is popular. He doesn’t like it there. When he first came to — in his first term, he actually tried to figure out if he could govern the country from New York instead of having to move to Washington.

And the city kind of hates him back. I mean, he is tremendously unpopular there.

So he’s been trying to get this done. The courts have told him that he cannot put his name on it. Then he said, well, if I renovate it — well, can we put a big plaque? This is all done through his trustees, by the way, who are all basically his cronies. If I renovate it, can you put a plaque on it that said, renovated by the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation or some damn thing.

And the courts again said, nice try, very funny, but no.

And so now the trustees have said, well, if we can’t rename it and the president won’t help us fundraise to rebuild it, we’re going to have to tear it down. Which was Trump event, essentially. I wrote a piece about it saying this is basically blackmail. This is the Dane-geld, as Kipling called it. He wants a payoff, he wants his name on it, or he’s going to destroy this beloved national icon.

And my argument is that we ought to let him. I think in full view of the American people, if this is who he is and the kind of administration he’s running, then I think Americans ought to see the John F. Kennedy Center torn down because the president had a temper tantrum.

But that’s where it stands now. He can’t get his name on it. The courts have stopped him at every turn, and his threat now is, it’s so decrepit that without my money, you know, without me raising money, it’ll have to be torn down.

Mina Kim: Well, as we’ve talked about, this issue with the monuments is very much a metaphor for his presidency. Thanks for digging through it with us. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic and Erin Thompson of City University of New York, author of Smashing Statues, and also thank you for doing that with us, our listeners.

And my thanks as well for Ana de Amaral for producing this segment.

This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.