Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures, from arches to paint jobs to statues, no matter the violation of law or taste.
The main entrance of Trump Tower with the inscription on it and a US flag are shown in New York City in the United States of America.
(Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Paul Josephson
May 17, 2026
Common Dreams
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
His Triumphal Arch
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues. Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol. Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history. Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive, and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the president overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 150 feet, was completed.
Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meager crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route. Recalled one observer, “Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, two thousand guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen’s uniforms.” (Peter the Great assembled a parade of little people in 1710, but out of jest and love, not out of inferiority.) Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s. He said, “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”
He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia.
Crowd size envy has its roots in psychological turmoil. Napoleon obviously had the first Napoleon complex. In the search for the source of his many complexes, the doctor who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 secretly removed his penis. The member made its way through various collectors, becoming “like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” but perhaps bigger than Trump’s who, while tall and obese, is “smaller than average… not freakishly small,” but with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”
Painting Over His Inadequacies
Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas over 20 by 30 feet. In 2014 Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation check to pay for a massive portrait of Trump in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.
To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties. Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy. Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool,” the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 430-foot Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the West Wing to build a ballroom.
For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the color and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for Trump at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began. Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 the mortally obese Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside with several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman, but apparently one over 18 years old, as they lounged in the pool. The impotent creature followed by posting a photo of Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the pool filled with feces.
Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia
The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia. His masculine maneuvers do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Center, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.” Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, centers, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centers for the arts.
Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as president, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-story Trump Tower“ becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 70-foot tall aluminum ”Kartlis Deda“ (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue located on Sololaki Hill. Then there’s the Trump Tower Down Under, a $1 billion development at 91 floors, to rise with other real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the ”Gaza Riviera,“ if the president can get Jared Kushner and the Israelis to remove all Palestinians.
Tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes. The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers,” activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read. Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,” but no Botox or orange dyes. Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1,400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs. In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.
If You Paint it, They Will Come
Trump loves gloss paints and gold accoutrements to distract attention from his infirm, swollen, and discolored appendages; for them he uses concealer and support socks. He ordered covering the blemishes of the 130-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House with white paint. White paint white may help make the building appear larger, but still not as large as Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, with more than 1,100 rooms and a nuclear bunker underneath. (Three thousand workers died during its construction.) Perhaps in response to Ceausescu’s grandiosity, Trump insists on erecting an ever-growing ballroom, now at $1 billion and with a nuclear bunker of its own.
But an authoritarian paint job will destroy the Eisenhower Building’s exterior of granite (quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, in America, not like most Trump products that are manufactured abroad). Paint adheres poorly to granite, reveals its imperfections, leads immediately to peeling, chipping, staining, and requires forever high maintenance—which is why no one paints granite kitchen counters. But tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Everything He Touches Turns to Gold
If not his own Lenin-like mausoleum, which was constructed with polished, but not painted granite, there will be a Miami-based excrescence, the Trump Presidential Library, perhaps with a mock-up bathroom to display the secret documents he stole from the White House—modeled on the bathroom he used at Mar-o-Lago to hold them. Also to be interred are the 747 jet that the Qataris gave him in return for favors. An auditorium featuring an already completed 22-foot gold statue of Trump will crown the spectacle. As one of his potent progeny, Eric, wrote, “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team… This landmark… will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” Sculptor Alan Cottrel manufactured the recently-unveiled statue, but was misled about its purposes and meanings, and he gently called it a “cluster f--k.” Contrell was instructed by the statue’s crypo investors “to alter Trump’s appearance… making him thinner and removing his ‘turkey neck,’” which may be a euphemism for some other appendage.
Whatever the size of the gold president, Trump’s Christian nationalist handlers have forgotten the fact that the 22-foot gold erection recalls the biblical story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the punishment to those who embraced idolatry. Even more, the golden Trump will not rise above the largest bronze statues in the world, the 65-feet tall effigies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. One hopes that Trump does not set his eyes upon the 555-feet tall Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone (marble) obelisk. We have heard that Trump wants to paint it orange.
If you have any doubt, remember after 9/11 Trump instinctively ejaculated on that day that one of his buildings had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Paul Josephson
Paul Josephson is professor emeritus of history at Colby College and the author of 15 books, with 40 years of experience working in archives in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. on the political history of modern science.
Full Bio >
Grifty Colossus Strikes Again and Again and...
Slapping the tacky gold everywhere
Image from Bluesky
Abby Zimet
May 15, 2026
Further
COMMON DREAMS
Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue “Fuck You” upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein “Memorial Reading Room” packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where “the truth is hard to deny.”
Trump’s narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn’t his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is “something dictators have done throughout history,” noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both “arrogant” and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, “Let the chiseling off begin,” but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we’re stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he’s proposed a $10-billion fund for more “beautification” projects around “the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world.”
Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he’s leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional “fans”: “Remarkable leadership,” “Master of the Deal,” “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN.” From the guy who’s “confused the country for his living room,” there’s D.C’s re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar “albatross“ nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, ”Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP“- ”like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug“ we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, ”Fuck You Cunt.“
Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a “VIP snorkel” in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a “patriotic,” seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with “head-spinning” corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers’ now-rapidly-shrinking dime.
Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka “reflective pond,” from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, “smart and beautiful construction” that Dems stupidly opposed - “Dumacrats love sewage” - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it’s now by a contractor he “did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with “uneven application” leaving bubbles, holes and “mottled shades of blue” in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn’t properly vetted, ditto a color “more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”
More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of multi-million-dollar waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for $10 for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, “where the Republic is currently moldering.“ Before ”a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory,“ the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but ”a celebration of life“ and symbol of ”the hand of God over (Trump’s) life.“ Definitely not a cult.
Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue “Fuck You” upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein “Memorial Reading Room” packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where “the truth is hard to deny.”
Trump’s narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn’t his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is “something dictators have done throughout history,” noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both “arrogant” and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, “Let the chiseling off begin,” but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we’re stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he’s proposed a $10-billion fund for more “beautification” projects around “the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world.”
Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he’s leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional “fans”: “Remarkable leadership,” “Master of the Deal,” “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN.” From the guy who’s “confused the country for his living room,” there’s D.C’s re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar “albatross“ nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, ”Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP“- ”like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug“ we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, ”Fuck You Cunt.“
Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a “VIP snorkel” in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a “patriotic,” seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with “head-spinning” corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers’ now-rapidly-shrinking dime.
Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka “reflective pond,” from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, “smart and beautiful construction” that Dems stupidly opposed - “Dumacrats love sewage” - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it’s now by a contractor he “did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with “uneven application” leaving bubbles, holes and “mottled shades of blue” in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn’t properly vetted, ditto a color “more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”
More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of multi-million-dollar waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for $10 for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, “where the Republic is currently moldering.“ Before ”a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory,“ the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but ”a celebration of life“ and symbol of ”the hand of God over (Trump’s) life.“ Definitely not a cult.
Tacky is as tacky does
Bluesky screenshot
Despite being heralded as God’s second favorite son - one who “understands the Scriptures better than the Pope” - Trump is also widely deemed “an economic serial killer” presiding over an “America First Corporate Graveyard,” skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly “the largest single act of grand larceny in American history” with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there’s never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he’s still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, “for the forgotten MAGA man.”
Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, “proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 “deposits” to “pre-order” the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The “deposit” provided “a conditional opportunity” to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were “non-binding.” “Made in the USA” became “Proudly American Designed.” “Delivery” dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called “Customer Service” got “Omega Auto Care.“ To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks ‘R Us.
Despite being heralded as God’s second favorite son - one who “understands the Scriptures better than the Pope” - Trump is also widely deemed “an economic serial killer” presiding over an “America First Corporate Graveyard,” skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly “the largest single act of grand larceny in American history” with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there’s never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he’s still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, “for the forgotten MAGA man.”
Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, “proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 “deposits” to “pre-order” the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The “deposit” provided “a conditional opportunity” to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were “non-binding.” “Made in the USA” became “Proudly American Designed.” “Delivery” dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called “Customer Service” got “Omega Auto Care.“ To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks ‘R Us.
"Service for the forgotten MAGA man"
Image from Bluesky
Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC’s War Memorial; they promise “high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism,” or, per Hegseth, “laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure.” Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against “Iranian schoolgirl,” “DEIyatollah,” low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other “threats to American freedom.”
Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing.
Another piece of protest art brings the truth of “one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump’s hometown. “The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York’s Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, “a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime.” The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities.
The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein’s more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men’s lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims “there’s nothing left to investigate.” The vast trove of information, organizers say, is “what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like.” Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, “wanted his name on stuff.” Now, here it is.
Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC’s War Memorial; they promise “high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism,” or, per Hegseth, “laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure.” Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against “Iranian schoolgirl,” “DEIyatollah,” low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other “threats to American freedom.”
Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing.
Another piece of protest art brings the truth of “one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump’s hometown. “The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York’s Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, “a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime.” The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities.
The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein’s more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men’s lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims “there’s nothing left to investigate.” The vast trove of information, organizers say, is “what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like.” Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, “wanted his name on stuff.” Now, here it is.
From the Trumpsonian
Image from Memorial Reading Room
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
Full Bio >
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
Full Bio >
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