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: 

With his popularity rating hovering at 33% to 39%, President Donald Trump desperately fears a third impeachment action against him if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the fast-approaching midterm elections scheduled for November 3.       

Thus, his almost crazed lust to be remembered forever. And for all his slim grasp of history, he knows that presidents and kings (of which he thinks himself the latter) are remembered for the wars they’ve won and the monuments they’ve left behind. 

Easily won wars, of course, are the best. And on January 3, 2026, Trump got just that.

American forces bombed military facilities and infrastructure in the capital city of Caracas and across northern Venezuela. And they captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both were flown to New York City to face federal drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges.

Flag of Venezuela

Savoring that triumph, Trump conspired with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overturn the leadership of Israel’s mortal enemy and America’s longtime antagonist: Iran.

Trump predicted several times that the war would be over in four to six weeks—the same timetable Adolf Hitler gave for the completion of his victory over the Soviet Union in 1941.

And just as “Operation Barbarossa” proved a fatal mistake, so Trump’s latest stab at playing Generalissimo has proven a total disaster. Six months into his war, he still has no plan for winning it or withdrawing from it without losing face.

Then there is his mania for monuments. 

Upon his return to the Presidency in 2025, he turned his “artistic” gifts on the White House. On June 9, 2025, contractors began paving over the grass of the White House Rose Garden 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.

By September, 2026 his administration had altered over 100 structures in Washington, D.C., alone, according to New York, which reported that the projects have collectively cost over a billion dollars.

On December 18, 2025, The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts became The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

Not, of course, by an act of Congress. That happened in January, 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the Center as a “living memorial” in his honor: The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. 

In Trump’s case, getting his name added to the Center was much simpler. First, he fired the longstanding board that had overseen the Center, and put his own handpicked board members on it.

Then his chosen thralls declared: “We’re adding Trump’s name to this building.”

No doubt to his amazement, there were serious objections to this—and lawsuits backing up those objections. 

On May 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump’s name was illegally added to the Center:

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

And he ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the building within two weeks—by June 12, two days before Trump’s 80th birthday.

Trump has, predictably, appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

He thus joined the ranks of arts-obsessed tyrants like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. For 12 years, Hitler served as the arbiter of culture in Nazi Germany. Stalin held that role for almost 30. 

Hitler considered himself an unappreciated artist. At 18, he had applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but was rejected twice. If he had a friend, it was the architect Albert Speer, with whom he felt an artistic kinship.

Even as the Third Reich collapsed, he found time to pore over architectural models he intended to turn into gigantic buildings.

In Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, author Frederic Spotts argues that Hitler saw the world corrupted by “evils” he must first destroy so he could re-create it to conform to his artistic ideals.

Like Hitler, Trump sees himself as an unrecognized artist through his erection of buildings. And, again like Hitler, he believes that he has a mission to replace ugliness with beauty.

But he’s clearly more focused on the demolition process than on the creation of beauty. 

On October 20, 2025, demolitions crews—on his orders—gutted the East Wing of the White House to create a massive, 90,000 square feet, 650-person capacity ballroom. 

And he has threatened to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if his name is not added to it.

Meanwhile, he intends to close the Center for two years, to hide the embarrassing truth that artists and audiences no longer want to go there while he runs it.