Upon his return to the Presidency in 2025, Donald Trump turned his “artistic” gifts on the White House.
On June 9, 2025, contractors began paving over the grass of the White House Rose Garden with stone tiles to create a patio.
This had been a special project of then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1962 she and designer Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created a classic, symmetrical space for official state functions and press events.
They installed a central open lawn surrounded by formal flower beds, seasonal plantings, and flowering crabapple trees.
The destruction of the rose garden ignited a firestorm of criticism. But Trump insisted that the paving go on anyway.
Like Adolf Hitler, Trump believes that “bigger is better” in architecture.
On July 31, 2025, the Trump administration announced that a 90,000 square feet addition would be made to the White House to incorporate a 650-person capacity ballroom.
In October, 2025, Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing to clear space for it. It’s the most expensive project in Trump’s roster, with an $800 million estimated price tag, according to New York.
American taxpayers are expected to foot more than half the bill, despite Trump’s repeated denials of this. In March, 2026, he told reporters that construction on the ballroom “is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”
Demolition of the East Wing of the White House
Trump intends this to be a monument to himself: By October, 2025, senior officials within the Trump administration were using the title, “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”
On August 31, the Supreme Court—packed with six Right-wing Justices—granted Trump approval to continue construction on his ballroom. This had been halted after a lower court issued a temporary block on the project earlier that month.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “We are living in the Golden Age of America, and this Building will be one of the Greatest ever constructed in Washington, D.C. When completed in the Summer of 2028, the magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex will be something that the entire Country is very proud of.”
In a rare burst of candor, Trump told New York Magazine that his construction projects are essentially monuments to himself: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
For Trump, there can’t be too many monuments to his memory. Among these:
- Like a Roman emperor, Trump has put his face on a new commemorative gold-finished $1 coin issued by the U.S. Mint—allegedly to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
- He has mused about changing the name of the Strait of Hormuz to “Trump Strait.” How he would get the Iranians to accept that name remains unclear.
- In May, 2005, the US Department of Agriculture was decorated with a banner featuring Trump’s face. Since then, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Labor have sported similar banners.
Achieving immortality—at least in how people remember them long after they’ve passed on—has long been a desire of tyrants. But once they’re dead, they no longer have control over the lives of their once-subject peoples.
So the way they’re remembered can prove vastly different from how they wanted to be regarded.
Alexander the Great thirsted be remembered as the world’s greatest conqueror, bringing Greek civilization to the nations he ravished.
Alexander the Great
Modern historians view him as a brilliant military leader—but also as a ruthless and megalomanic tyrant who slaughtered whole peoples and caused widespread destruction. Moreover, his empire collapsed quickly after his death.
Leon Trotsky—the Russian revolutionary and bitter foe of Joseph Stalin—wrote: “Nero, too, was a product of his epoch. Yet after he perished his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything.
“The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to think that this is consoling.”
By the time he died in 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had an estimated 6,000 statues of himself erected across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, holding the world record for the most statues raised to a living person.
After his death and the start of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, the vast majority of these statues were quietly removed, demolished, or melted down.
Finally, there is this classic poetic commentary on the uncertainty of immortality, courtesy of Percy Bysshe Shelley:
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ABC NEWS, ACADEMY AWARDS, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, ALTERNET, AP, ARI SHAPIRO, AV FILM, “BROKEN ARROW”, “GREEN BOOK”, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CIVIL RIGHTS, CLASSICAL PIANO, CNN, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOZ, DON SHIRLEY, FACEBOOK, FREEDOM RIDERS, HOMOSEXUALITY, JAMES MEREDITH, JAMES STEWART, JAZZ PIANO, JEFF CHANCLER, KU KLUX KLAN, MAHERSHALA ALI, MISSISSIPPI, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, RACISM, RAW STORY, REBECCA THEODORE-VACHON, REUTERS, ROBERT F. KENNEDY, ROSS BARNETT, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SEGREGATION, SLATE, SPIKE LEE, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, TONY VALLELONGA, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI, UPI, USA TODAY, VIGGO MORTENSEN, X
“GREEN BOOK” AND ITS TIMELESS MESSAGE
In History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on September 11, 2026 at 12:10 am“The [Oscar] winners included Regina King, Rami Malek, Alfonso Cuaron, Spike Lee—a group of people from very different backgrounds representing films that tell nuanced stories about diverse experiences.
“And then the top honor is given to a film that many people have criticized for being an overly simplistic story about race told from the perspective of a white savior.”
So argued Ari Shapiro, a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR’s award-winning news magazine. He made his comments the day after Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 91st annual Academy Awards on February 24, 2019.
Green Book is a 2018 biographical drama set in the Deep South of 1962. It’s based on the true story of a concert tour by a black classical and jazz pianist, Don Shirley, and his driver and bodyguard, Tony Vallelonga. Mahershala Ali plays Shirley and Viggo Mortensen plays Vallelonga.
The two men are polar opposites: Shirley is cultured and eloquent; Vallelonga is streetwise and volatile. Shirley is used to dealing with the cream of New York society. Vallelonga is used to dealing with its dregs—as a nightclub bouncer.
Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley
When his nightclub closes for renovations, he responds to an ad by Shirley for a driver for his eight-week concert tour through the Midwest and Deep South.
This is 1962, a time when a black Air Force veteran, James Meredith, must be given protection by deputy U.S. marshals when he enters the segregated University of Mississippi. White and black “Freedom Riders” are canvassing the South, sitting at segregated lunch counters and often being attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and equally racist Southern police.
In fact, the title of the movie—Green Book—is derived from a travel guide written for blacks venturing into the Deep South: The Negro Motorist Green Book. Written by Victor Hugo Green, its purpose is to help blacks find motels and restaurants that will accept them.
And as Shirley and Vallelonga make their odyssey through the South, they find themselves staying at separate hotels—and sometimes together, after Vallelonga slips Shirley into his own room.
An AV Film review called Green Book “a kind of comforting liberal fantasy, a #NotAllRacists trifle that suggests that our deep, festering divisions can be sutured through some quality time on the open road, resolving differences over a bucket of KFC.”
At the start of the movie, Vallelonga throws away a glass after a black construction worker drinks from it. But during his tour of the South, he becomes increasingly sympathetic to the plight suffered by Shirley—and other blacks forced to daily endure a series of humiliations.
Viggo Mortensen as Tony Vallelonga
According to television critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon: “Green Book is a feel-good movie. It doesn’t really require a lot of critical thinking or self-analysis. You know, people walk out of the movie feeling that, oh, well, racism is over, we’re good. So I think those are the things that are going on.”
Actually, the film makes clear that some people will always be racists. Thus, Shirley finds himself repeatedly forced to eat in the segregated rooms of the hotels where he’s to play concerts. And he’s almost murdered by a group of racists when he makes the mistake of going into a whites’ only bar. He survives only because Vallelonga arrives in time to rescue him.
And Shirley proves just as great a friend to Vallelonga. He introduces the semi-literate bouncer to the power of the written word by helping him craft articulate, heartfelt letters to his wife.
Toward the end of the movie, Vallelonga and Shirley are pulled over by a Mississippi police officer. Shirley’s “crime”: Being black—and out at night. When the officer insults Vallelonga, Tony punches him—and he and Shirley wind up in jail.
Shirley asks for permission to call his “lawyer”—and the man he dials is Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy, in turn, calls Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Barnett is already having his share of troubles with the Kennedys, and he orders the police: Let those men go—now!
This scene underscores the importance of electing people who will stand against injustice. Watching the release of Vallelonga and Shirley, it’s impossible to imagine the Trump administration intervening in such a manner.
At the end of the movie, Shirley visits Vallelonga’s home—where he’s warmly received by Tony and his family. The film’s end credits reveal that the two men remained friends until they died, within months of each other, in 2013.
In 1950, a Western called Broken Arrow-–starring James Stewart as Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as Cochise—told the true story of a friendship between a white man and an Apache. For many Americans, this came as a revelation.
After decades of seeing Indians depicted as bloodthirsty savages, audiences saw that there were those—among red men and white men—who could rise above prejudice and see each other as worthy of respect.
The lesson of Green Book is exactly the same. And it’s needed now more than ever.
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