Someday, Americans will visit Washington, D.C., stand in front of the White House, and learn that it was destroyed twice.
The first time, the British did it.
The second time, an American president did.
The British came as an invading army in 1814. They entered Washington during a war, and set fire to the President’s House.
America rebuilt it.
More than two centuries later, Donald Trump came to the White House as its temporary occupant, and began tearing down part of it to satisfy his vanity.
He demolished the East Wing.
He wanted a ballroom.
That fact will become more astonishing with the passage of time, not less.
Donald Trump has always confused possession with ownership.
He believes that because something has been entrusted to him, it belongs to him. The presidency. The White House. The Department of Justice. The military. The Republican Party. The government. America.
They do not. None of them do.
The White House belongs to the American people. The presidency belongs to the American people. The country belongs to the American people.
Donald Trump is passing through. That is the thing he cannot comprehend.
He will be gone.
We will rebuild everything. The East Wing can be rebuilt. The rooms can be restored. The marble can be removed. The gold can be stripped away. The names can be changed back. The institutions he has defaced can be repaired. The offices he has corrupted can be reclaimed. The alliances he has damaged can be renewed. The traditions he has desecrated can be restored.
The republic can heal.
Donald Trump has spent his entire adult life putting his name on things. Trump Tower. Trump Plaza. Trump casinos. Trump golf courses. Trump steaks. Trump University. Trump airplanes.
His name has always been the product.
Now, at the end of his life, he wants something much bigger. He wants to put his name on America. He wants permanence. He wants monuments. He wants buildings. He wants portraits.
He wants Washington remade in his image so that Americans who have not yet been born will be forced to encounter Donald Trump long after Donald Trump is dead.
He will not succeed.
There will come a time when there will not be a single public object of consequence in America named for Donald Trump unless his family owns it.
Nothing.
His name will be removed from the places where his vanity imposed it upon the republic. His plane will not become some permanent imperial possession. His renovations will not be sacred. His alterations will not be untouchable.
They will be undone.
I do not believe his portrait will hang permanently in the White House.
Perhaps 20 years from now, perhaps longer, a Republican president will return to that building after the fever has finally broken.
That president will understand why.
The Republican Party will only become a legitimate governing party again when it has repudiated Donald Trump.
It will have to. It will have to explain how it surrendered itself to a corrupt demagogue.
It will have to explain why so many senators, governors, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, billionaires, pastors, television personalities and party officials chose submission over duty.
It will have to explain why they knew better and knelt anyway.
A future Republican president will understand that hanging Donald Trump’s portrait in the White House would not be an act of tradition. It would be an act of restoration for the very thing the party had to destroy in order to survive.
Trumpism will become a stain politicians flee from.
The people who served it will discover that proximity to Donald Trump was not an inheritance. It was a mark.
The titles will disappear. The motorcades will stop. The television cameras will move on. The crowds will go home. The red hats will fade.
The slogans will become strange artifacts displayed behind museum glass so that schoolchildren can look at them and ask their parents and grandparents a very simple question: how did this happen?
That question will haunt the Baby Boom generation.
The Greatest Generation is remembered for saving the world. They crossed beaches under machine-gun fire. They liberated concentration camps. They defeated fascism. They built the institutions that helped preserve peace and freedom across much of the world for generations.
They understood sacrifice because history demanded it from them.
The Baby Boom generation inherited what they built. It inherited the strongest country on Earth. It inherited extraordinary prosperity. It inherited institutions strengthened by sacrifice.
It inherited an America whose power was unrivaled, and whose democratic system, however imperfect, had endured civil war, depression, world war and profound social upheaval.
And the Baby Boom generation will be remembered for nearly losing the republic.
Donald Trump will be its great political disgrace.
He will be the culmination of its worst excesses: narcissism, grievance, spectacle, consumption, celebrity, selfishness, and the conviction that inheritance is the same thing as achievement.
He inherited wealth. He inherited a country. He treated both as though they existed for him.
They did not.
The work of repairing what was damaged will belong principally to the generations behind him: Generation X, the Millennials, and eventually the generations behind them.
Their defining American political project will not be Trump’s destruction. It will be the restoration that follows it.
They will rebuild confidence in institutions that were corrupted. They will restore the principle that no president is above the law. They will restore the idea that public service is a duty rather than an opportunity for enrichment. They will restore alliances built by Americans who understood that American strength was magnified by friendship, trust and credibility.
They will restore competence. They will restore seriousness. They will restore decency. They will restore the understanding that losing an election means leaving office.
They will restore the ancient American proposition that power passes peacefully because the country is greater than the person temporarily entrusted with leading it.
And someday, perhaps, they will literally rebuild the part of the White House Donald Trump knocked down. Stone by stone. Room by room.
It would be fitting.
The restoration of the building will mirror the restoration of the republic.
Donald Trump believes history is something that can be conquered through branding.
He is wrong. History is merciless.
It eventually strips away the motorcades, uniforms, flags, rallies, propaganda, fear and power.
Then it asks a simple question: what did you do when responsibility was yours?
Washington surrendered power.
Lincoln preserved the Union.
Roosevelt confronted fascism.
Eisenhower preserved the peace.
Trump will have his answer too.
He will be remembered as the most vile president who ever occupied the office, and as the man who came closer than any president before him to destroying the constitutional inheritance he was sworn to preserve.
His name will survive — just not in the way he imagines.
Benedict Arnold’s name survived. So did Joseph McCarthy’s.
Some names become monuments. Others become warnings.
Donald Trump may ultimately achieve the immortality he has spent his life chasing.
His name may become part of the American vocabulary: Trumpian.
It will be a description of corruption, narcissism, cowardice disguised as strength, cruelty mistaken for toughness, dishonesty practiced without shame, public power used for private purpose, loyalty demanded to a man instead of a Constitution.
Someday, being compared to Donald Trump may be among the greatest insults that can be delivered in American public life.
That will be his monument — not a ballroom, airplane, a building, or a portrait.
A warning.
Someday, Americans will stand outside the White House, and look at a building that survived the British Army and Donald Trump.
They will know something we desperately need to remember now. Presidents come and go. Demagogues come and go. Political movements that seem invincible collapse.
Fear passes. Cults end.
America remains.
The British burned the White House. We rebuilt it.
Donald Trump tore part of it down. We will rebuild that too.
Then we will rebuild everything else.
I remember his gold shitholes in Atlantic City and wanted to forget them back then. Bankrupt is not a word that applies only to finances.
I agree with your belief in our future, or at least I share your hope. There is one difference I have with your view. I would like to leave the White House as it is today, with the East Wing nothing but a disproportionate, ugly construction site. I want this to stand as a monument to what happens when people don't show up to vote, when people are brainwashed into thinking that both sides are the same. I want a permanently ruined White House to remain as a monument to people who withheld their votes as protests ("but Gaza!!!"), who were too lazy, who were brainwashed by Fox, who lied to themselves about both parties being the same. I want every eighth grade class on their trip to the capital to see that pit in the ground as a testament of not caring enough to vote. I want Congress to pass a law making every Election Day a national holiday, and a special USPS bureau to protect the vote.