A Theme Park of Donald Trumps Dreams – The New Yorker

On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order, On Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes. It is a snapshot of his view of the world and his place in it, but unlike some of his other executive orders, it isnt explicitly cruel and vengeful, or empty and threatening; it is, rather, the creation of a theme park. At the moment, he feels that he is losing his grasp on Trumps America, so he wants to build it in stone and fence it off, perhaps so that he can live there when all is lost.

Americans, in the largest protest movement in this countrys history, have been toppling monuments. When nations topple monuments, they often place them in parksor, more often, in unmarked and unlandscaped spaces that are gradually reconfigured as parks after they are suddenly decorated with statuary. New Delhi didnt start toppling its colonial monuments until a decade after independence; in the nineteen-sixties, a number of British nobles likenesses were transported to a vast, empty space that became known as the graveyard of statues. There they lay for another thirty years, decaying, as birds defecated on them and visitors marked them up. In the nineteen-nineties, local authorities decided to transform the space into a park designed to celebrate Indias triumph over its fallen rulers. The plan never came to fruition, though, and the park is now unfinished and overgrown, a ruin.

In Moscow, when a hard-line coup failed in August, 1991, bringing down the Soviet state, monuments to a variety of Soviet leaders, from the founder of the secret police to the first education minister to Stalin himself, were toppledor, in the case of Stalin, dug up, for this particular monument had been buried in a sculptors yard for three decadesand hauled to what was then an empty lot opposite Gorky Park. Bolsheviks in bronze, granite, and plaster lay on the grass for a number of years. People jumped and climbed and drew all over them. As Russia began to grow nostalgic for its Soviet past, the lot transformed: the formerly fallen leaders were set upright, then cleaned of graffiti, then restored to their pedestals, and finally fenced off, viewable only from a distance, which made them seem grand again. By the time Vladimir Putin officially assumed the office of the Presidency for the third time, in 2012, the formerly empty space, which by then was called the Sculpture Park and charged admission, had become a theme park of Soviet glory.

Trump seems to want to leap over a process that took Russia twenty years and proceed directly to creating a theme park of American grandeur. On June 26th, he signed an executive order that painted demonstrators protesting Confederate and other monuments as a violent mob of Marxists intent on destroying American history itself. It directed the federal government to step in and prosecute people who damage monuments and to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that permit the desecration of monuments, memorials, or statues. A week later came the executive order on building and rebuilding, which puts the story told in the first order in loftier words: My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory. To preserve this memory, the order creates a task force charged with establishing a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes (National Garden).

The garden, which has a planned opening for before July 4, 2026, is intended to house statues of American heroes, some of whom are listed in the order: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright. The list suggests a Trumpian view of what constitutes American greatness. The Presidency is represented by Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Lincolnand Reagan. The First Lady singled out for inclusion in the park is Dolley Madison. No F.D.R., no J.F.K., no Eleanor Roosevelt. The twentieth century is represented by two generals, a soldier, a pilot, an astronaut, the inventors of the airplane, a baseball player, a conservative Supreme Court Justice, two members of the clergy (Graham and King), and Reagan. There are no artists or scientists on this list. The only writer is Stowe, the author of Uncle Toms Cabin. This is America as Trump sees it: a skeletal, heroic history, with a lot of shooting, a lot of flying, and very little government. Excluded from this history entirely are Native Americans; this is made explicit in Section 7, which defines the term historically significant American as an American citizen or someone who lived prior to or during the American Revolution and were not American citizens, but who made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States. The proposed park, in other words, is one of settler-colonialist history.

The executive order also dictates aesthetics: All statues in the National Garden should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations. This passage appears twice. It is as though Trump is stomping his foot in the order, to make it clear, once and for all, that he wants his past comfortable and easy to read. The author of the document really seems to hate the few existing American monuments that are modernist or abstract, such as the Wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In the history that the National Garden will tell, there is no modern or contemporary art, and there are no social movements that such art may represent.

Earlier this year, the White House considered issuing an executive order that would have instituted a unified style for federal architecture, dictating that the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style. The American Institute of Architects, among others, objected, and the order appears to have been shelved. But, as Trump often does, he has returned with the same desire expressed in a different package. The aesthetic represents Trump well: classical architecture in the twenty-first century is always an imitation, an act of plagiarism performed artlessly, as when Melania Trump borrowed the words of a Michelle Obama speech, or when Inauguration bakers copied the design of Obamas cakeas though the Trumps just thought that this was what power looks like. Even the name of the executive order betrays this aspiration-free view of human achievement: building and rebuilding stand in parallel, as though they are in effect the same thing. The original and its hollow, mass-produced copy do look the same from a distance. The gold curtains that Trump hung in the Oval Office and the gilded cherubs that litter his apartment belong in the same category; we might call it kitsch, if we thought Trump capable of play or irony.

For all its hand-wringing and foot stomping, the executive order is also a gesture of retreat, or at least retrenchment. In the face of a changing history and a country in uprising, Trump wants to create a landa gardenin which he can walk among the statues of men whom he imagines to have been great. There would probably be a fence. This is a territorial cordoning off of history, which is what the entire Trumpian project has been.

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A Theme Park of Donald Trumps Dreams - The New Yorker