It was no surprise that Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by despoiling the South Lawn of the White House, which hosts the annual children’s Easter Egg Roll, with his Ultimate Fighting Championship extravaganza in which ersatz gladiators pummeled each other inside a cage adorned with the president’s cryptocurrency promotions.
Trump sat ringside at the fighting pit packed with thousands of invitees – tycoons, cabinet members, Republican cronies, MAGA groupies – who went berserk as the fighters bloodied up each other. The South Lawn and nearby Ellipse lawns were ravaged and will cost $1 million to repair.
The attendees thanked President Trump and God, in that order. One of the heavyweights sucker-punched the former first lady, shouting to laughter and applause, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
The event featured Trump’s obsession with machismo, his merging of presidential power with financial self-interest, and his fixation on projecting strength and domination with sleazy and pretentious stunts.
Indeed, there appears to be no limit to Trump’s debasement of norms, rules, and values. He needs to break things, flaunt his power, demand fealty, vilify, and inflame. His psychotic behavior no longer elicits outrage. His madness has become almost banal.
To Trump, the White House is an extension of Mar-a-Lago. Consider his transformation of the Rose Garden into a brick and stone patio just like Mar-a-Lago and his creation of the “Rose Garden Club,” a lavish hospitality suite supported by taxpayers for insiders and billionaires, complete with outdoor tables, chairs, and striped umbrellas.
Or consider his changes to the adjacent West Colonnade wall, which Trump transformed into a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” featuring portraits of past presidents — although Trump deliberately replaced Joe Biden’s portrait with a framed image of an autopen, which Trump claimed Biden used to sign documents illegitimately and which showed Biden’s “cognitive decline.” In fact, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate Biden’s use of the autopen.
Trump’s fixation on remaking Washington, DC has been endless fodder for late-night comics who mock Trump’s need to adorn his fragile ego with extravagant furnishings, grandiose monuments, and banners for self-esteem.
Some of Trump’s renovations have become humiliating debacles. Consider his $16.4 million plan to paint the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with “American Flag Blue” in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Trump slammed Presidents Obama and Biden for neglecting the pool and hired a no-bid crony to do the renovations. But Trump’s sclerotic effort produced a green morass of algae, slime, fetid muck, and large strips of polyurethane floating in the water.
They also found a dead duck.
Despite the opinion of experts that the stagnant pool in hot weather with duck droppings and phosphate became a petri dish for algae, and notwithstanding the round-the-clock surveillance, Trump declared without any evidence that the pool’s condition was due to vandals who “put fertilizer in the water” and “hacked up the pool with a box cutter or knife.”
Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House to install his Mar-a-Lago ballroom imitation has been ridiculed as pretentious, overbearing, and unlawful. As critics have pointed out, the White House is not Trump’s house; it’s the “People’s House.” Trump is a temporary resident.
And contrary to his assurances that U.S. taxpayers would not pay a cent for his ballroom, the White House budget office recently announced that an additional $351.6 million in taxpayer money has been appropriated to pay for ballroom security.
Trump’s financial excesses are well known and have led to his many bankruptcies, fraud judgments, and criminal convictions.
And then there is the 250-foot-high triumphal arch, which Trump plans to install between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Vietnam War veterans have brought a lawsuit claiming the arch is unseemly and a desecration of the place where war dead lie next to the memorial of a president who ended slavery and preserved the union. They say the area is sacred and honors sacrifice and courage.
But Trump has explicitly stated that the triumphal arch is not to honor sacrifice and courage; it is to honor himself.
When asked directly by a CBS News reporter who the monument was meant to honor, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.” And Trump wants to place on top of the arch a large replica of his upraised “Fight, fight, fight!” fist—his response to the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Trump, who received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War for bone spurs in his feet, refused to visit a cemetery in France containing the graves of American soldiers killed in World War I, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
He ridiculed the more than 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood as “suckers.”
He attacked the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed in Iraq.
He disparaged Senator John McCain for having been captured during the Vietnam War.
When historians write about the Trump presidency, they will surely note how he has perverted truth, rewritten history, ravaged economic stability, militarized cities, tyrannized migrants, pardoned criminals, plundered for self-gain, demeaned science, destroyed innovation, wrecked alliances, sought imperial conquests, made unjust wars, corrupted laws, chilled higher education, and undermined election integrity.
These historians will ask with incomprehension: How it was that Americans elected Trump twice to be their president?
And these historians will certainly find clues to Trump’s authoritarian, self-aggrandizing, imperial behavior in his quest to find endless ways to memorialize himself.
Bennett L. Gershman is a distinguished professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.