Republican gloats over Trump's snowballing list of failures

In a recent conversation with The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger, conservative commentator and fellow Bulwark contributor Bill Kristol gleefully listed President Donald Trump’s numerous humiliations.

“The ballroom is twice as expensive, contrary to his statements,” Kristol told Egger. “It turns out ... The Washington Post reports it's much more expensive than he said, and we're already spending taxpayer money on it.” After repeating Trump’s claim that no taxpayer money would be spent on the ballroom, Kristol added that “they've already spent tens of billions, I think, on this ballroom, which isn't built yet and may not get built, since their court case is pending.”

Kristol did not end his analysis there.

“All their other wonderful schemes — the children's $50 bill, the triumphal arch — thank god, are not being built yet,” Kristol told Egger. “So, yeah, it's nice to see some failures, especially — well, it's unfortunate when it hurts the United States, obviously, since he is president, so it's hard to avoid that to some degree. But certainly in these things that are pure megalomaniacal grandiosity on his part, to see them fail in somewhat amusing fashion is a good thing.”

From there, Kristol pivoted to Trump’s beleaguered reflecting pool — which has now changed from a crystal blue color prior to Trump’s interventions to an algae-filled green afterward — and Trump’s planned triumphal arch.

Kristol told Egger: “I really think that thing can be stopped, and I'm going to spend a lot of time over the next — I'm going to bore people in the newsletters going on about various efforts to stop it and why it has to be stopped and why it would be such a desecration to have it looming over Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.”

At the same time, Kristol agreed with Egger that the one advantage of the triumphal arch being built is that it would give Americans something to tear down, similar to the destruction of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square after he was deposed in 2003. To illustrate why this would be a relief for people, Kristol quoted a Latin phrase that means “condemnation of memory.”

“That's one of these sort of ‘pulling down the statues of Saddam’ type — yeah, no, well, certainly if he does build it, we need to have a — what's the Latin phrase — damnatio memoriae, I guess, which I've come across, other people have used,” Kristol said. “It turns out it's one of these Latin phrases that isn't actually from antiquity — it was invented in the 16th century. I mean, it's correct Latin, they just didn't — they used the concept in antiquity, where they would erase very bad emperors' faces from monuments and so forth.

He added, “And it was extended also to: let's just get rid of anything that reminds us of these people.”

The Daily Beast’s Windsor Mann explained last month that Trump is building memorials to himself now, even though these are usually done after a president has died and his legacy is secured, because he wants to guarantee that he is remembered regardless of his many scandals and policy failures.

“Donald Trump’s two favorite things are himself and money,” Mann wrote. “Now he has decided to combine the two. Indeed, for the first time in history, the sitting president is adding his signature to our paper currency. Trump’s name will be on your money, which is his way of saying that he owns you.”

He added that Trump also tried unsuccessfully to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts so it would include his own name, successfully altered the U.S. Institute of Peace to include his name and is trying to rename Penn Station after himself. Even before his second inauguration, House Republicans pushed legislation to rename Washington Dulles International Airport the “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” while in November “Florida State Rep. Meg Weinberger introduced a bill to rename the Palm Beach International Airport as another ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’ Sure, why not?”

Trump even reportedly convinced cryptocurrency investors to install a $300,000 two-story tall statue of himself on his Doral, Florida golf course.

“It is, like the man it commemorates, vulgar and excessive,” says Mann. “... The way to Trump’s heart is through his ego, and nothing satiates his ego as much as a graven image made in his image and at someone else’s expense.”

Mann pointed out that previous memorialized presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were memorialized “once public opinion and historians have had time to reach a consensus as to whether their contributions merit commemoration.” Because Trump is not going to be remembered in the favorable light as those three presidential predecessors, Mann argued he is likely trying to guarantee some immortality by throwing as much as he can at the wall to see what sticks.

“After all, what if we built a statue of someone who turned out to be in the Epstein files or who, after losing an election, tried to overthrow our democracy?” Mann pointed out. “It would be costly and tedious to dismantle a statue of such a person after these revelations surfaced. Perhaps Trump realizes this, which is why he’s building not one monument to himself but scores of them.”

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