Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

–Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

“It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

—Donald J. Trump, as quoted by Fox News propagandist Jesse Watters, on his “big beautiful ballroom”

Donald J. Trump is ubiquitous and inescapable. He appears in our newspapers and on our televisions, cellphones, and computer screens almost every single day. Ever the Killjoy, leaving his mark on every institution he touches. Ever the Killjoy, he uses every public speaking engagement to boast of his achievements and air his endless list of grievances, turning turkey pardons and Christmas tree lightings into joyless spectacles of self-promotion and score-settling. He – and his resentments – are everywhere. As are his monuments, real and proposed.

In less than a year in office, Trump has succeeded in paying tribute to himself where others have refused. He is like a feral animal marking its territory or a delinquent child graffitiing public property with a golden Sharpie. His name now adorns the United States Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center – the latter named for a real war hero who, unlike the White House’s current occupant, did not receive a deferment because of bogus “bone spurs” or describe STDs as his “own personal Vietnam.” His followers, for their part, are afflicted with TDS – Trump Devotion Syndrome, not to be confused with the more commonly discussed Trump Derangement Syndrome – a malady plaguing his cabinet members, Republican members of Congress, and his MAGA base, which demands unquestioned fealty.

Trump wants his name on everything, excluding, of course, the Epstein files.

Like Ozymandias, his frowning, sneering visage glowers at us from federal buildings, National Park Service America the Beautiful Annual Resident passes, and million-dollar Trump Gold Cards. (Don’t leave home without them, or risk being deported unless you also purchase the Trump Gold ICE Millionaire Pass Card for another million or two or three…). If he had his way – and who’s to stop him? – he would put his name on football stadiums, airports, state roadways, and “golden fleet” battleship classes. That fleet may prove necessary as Trump pursues new forever wars. It may be only a matter of time before Trump unveils a “Trump Doctrine” rationalizing the annexation of Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, while striking “deals” to secure the critical minerals and rare earths of Australia, Japan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, and other countries deemed “important to national security” – not only to counter China, but also to enrich his circle of billionaire AI cronies.

There are, however, moments when honesty escapes the black hole of Killjoy’s ego, as when, in the epigraph, he admits he erects monuments to himself since no one else will.

Well, at least public monuments. Since his second term, Trump has been showered with golden trophies and ceremonial baubles from Apple CEO Tim Cook, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, President of South Korea, and a host of others – all eager to polish the ego of the man who would be king. And through his legion of sycophants – including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who is sponsoring a bill (H.R. 5789), the President Donald J. Trump Congressional Gold Medal Act,which would award him the medal in “recognition of his exceptional leadership and dedication to strengthening America’s diplomatic relations during his presidency” – he continues to receive a steady stream of golden laurels.

Others, including Luna, have proposed adding Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore (despite the resulting damage it would do to the monument – built on stolen and sacred Native American land). Meanwhile Trump himself, in yet another gesture of onanistic hubris we have come to expect from the orange Albert Speer, has announced plans to erect what he has variously called a “Memorial Circle/Independence Triumphal Arch,” or what CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe dubbed the “Arc de Trump.” No doubt this will be followed by a new Amazon documentary, The Trump of the Will, perhaps directed by Brett Ratner (if he can schedule it before he helms Rush Hour 4), Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza, or “Special Ambassador” to Hollywood Mel Gibson, an apt choice given the Leni Riefenstahl overtones of his oeuvre.

While all of this may sound like satire, most of it is not. Trump has already reshaped federal spaces to suit his own narcissistic aesthetic. He has turned the Oval Office into a nouveau riche trophy room, remodeled White House hallways into portrait-lined corridors, complete with self-aggrandizing Truth Social-inspired plaques that pillory his predecessors and praise his own petty achievements. The purportedly phallic-challenged Trump has torn down the East Wing to erect – like another allegedly small-d dictator – a bunker-topping ballroom. How long before the White House becomes the “Trump House,” with the title emblazoned in his favored gold Shelley Script font along the building’s pediment?

But Trump’s destructive excesses don’t end with the federal buildings he has demolished and degraded. There has been a human toll as well. At home, he has ravaged the health care system as he fiddles with his “concept” of one. His Department of Justice has terminated hundreds of public safety and victim services grants and implemented policies that severely undermine the nation’s public health. He has unleashed goon squads that have sent people to ICE and other facilities where they are sexually abused, brutalized, and killed, unpunished abuses that tellingly predate theTrump regime. Indeed, that fact ultimately explains why we are where we are.

Abroad, Trump has obliterated USAID, armed the genocidal government of a war criminal who has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and overseen operations coordinated by his own Secretary of War Crimes that have killed over 100 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean, as he prepares to repeat Gulf War II by declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and send Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the UN, where, one imagines, he will dramatically wave a vial of the substance before the Security Council. After all, it worked for George W. Bush and Colin Powell, didn’t it? And we’ve seen how many days they spent in lockup because of their murderous lies. In government, as in finance, the elites are all Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” And so the mad American farce continues, which, again, is why we are where we are.

This is also why they continue to violate the law with impunity. By now we should expect that the rule of law – domestic and international – and the rules of war mean nothing. Not only to Trump and his enablers, but also those who say they stand to protect them but refrain from doing so. How does one explain their inertia? The calculation seems to be that once Trump’s economic agenda fails, the misery index rises, and his approval ratings tank, Democrats will ride to victory in the midterms (assuming, of course, elections are held), regain the White House in 2028 (ditto), and perhaps even reclaim the House and Senate. They will then remove his abominations and the nation will drift back toward a semblance of normalcy. If you believe that, I have a “ceasefire” deal for you in Gaza.

Genocides don’t begin with terrorist attacks, and dictatorships don’t thrive in a vacuum; they require conditions that lay the groundwork – a series of uncorrected transgressions that allow them to take root. They require institutions that look the other way, officials and bureaucrats who shrink from their responsibilities, soldiers who simply obey orders, and citizens who no longer care because fear and hatred of the Other is not only normalized but celebrated, as the public proves itself all too ready to accept each new breach of the social contract as the cost of living out its version of the American Dream. Institutional checks and balances are only as strong as the people entrusted to uphold them. This is unlikely in a political climate in which those who grift on hateful rhetoric are made cultural heroes and canonized as the second coming of Martin Luther King.

Unfortunately, those who contest such deceptions are sadly ineffective. This is why a 34-count felon and adjudicated sexual abuser sits in the Oval Office. Impeachment? Been there, done that. And while there have been a few lonely souls in Congress – Reps. Shri Thanedar and Al Green – who have called for Trump’s impeachment – there has been no momentum. The courts? Yes, they have ruled against Trump repeatedly, but he ignores them, filing countersuits of his own to gum up the process. The 25th Amendment? An obviously mentally addled president who uses every speaking engagement to rant and rave at ear-shattering volume about everything except coherent policy – who rambles endlessly about his press secretary’s filler-injected lips and his wife’s “drawers,” who boasts about acing his cognitive tests but doesn’t know which part of his anatomy was scanned during his MRI – somehow manages to escape its invocation. This is due in part to a Cabinet and, potentially, a Republican-controlled Congress that lack the courage to invoke it, not only out of devotion to their Dear Leader but also because they sense that making America white again has become a national priority, even if the charge is led by a sociopath with a self-professed (confessed?) “love for minors.” Sure, maybe he meant “miners.” But we won’t know for certain until the unredacted Epstein files are released, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have already confirmed that he is in them – that Killjoy was there. But, as Wiles put it, Trump and his beastly bestie “were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever – I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”

Dictatorships emerge not out of darkness, but from dismissal and denial.

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