Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Friday, September 11, 2026 21:58
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The United States of Donald Trump
Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can, but America’s institutions don’t belong to him.
By David A. Graham |December 19, 2025, 7:11 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/donald-trump-naming-am
erican-institutions/685362/
When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.”
The advice might seem “truly bizarre,” as Mount Vernon’s CEO described the visit to others, but Trump practices what he preaches. Yesterday, the Trump White House announced that the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which is chaired by Donald J. Trump, who was appointed to that role by Donald J. Trump, who also filled the board with fellow Trump appointees—would rename the venue the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. This was, the Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt opined, a tribute to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year” at the center, “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction but also financially, and its reputation.”
This is a challenging claim from a factual standpoint. As The Washington Post found, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have tanked since Trump’s hostile takeover of the institution in February. Patrons booed Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance at concerts this year. Events there have taken on an uncanny sheen of decay and mediocrity, my colleague Alexandra Petri reported after attending the Kennedy Center Honors last week.
The announcement is also challenging from a statutory perspective. The Kennedy Center’s name was bestowed by a law passed by Congress and can’t be changed by the board on its own. Tim Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s nephew, wrote on X, “Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson?”
Who’s to stop Trump, though? Workers began changing the signage this morning, and Congress seems unlikely to act; anyway, even if the name isn’t formally changed, nothing will prevent the president from calling it what he wants. Consider the Department of Defense, which the administration insists on calling the Department of War, despite the former name being established by law. Or more apropos, take the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was also established and named by Congress but which recently got a (rather premature) rebrand, with the facade now reading Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. The gesture here is blunt. The president placing his own name before the nation’s is redolent of dictators in isolated countries—North Korea’s Kim family and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who even renamed January after himself—and long-ago absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, who is said to have declared, “L’état, c’est moi.”
In line with his view of himself not merely as an elected representative but as father of the nation (or perhaps “daddy” of the nation?), Trump has put his name and image in places large and small. His scowling visage is next to George Washington’s portrait on National Parks passes; for good measure, citizens can now enter parks for free on Trump’s birthday, which happens to be Flag Day, but no longer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new pay-for-play visa for the very rich is called the Trump Gold Card. The Treasury has proposed 250th-anniversary $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, a serious deviation from precedent. (The law bars printing money with images of living people on it but does not apply to minting coins.) Does anyone have any doubt what name he’ll put on his boondoggle ballroom at the White House?
This tendency is not new. Throughout his career, Trump has plastered his name on whatever he can, including many buildings, a hideous pair of sneakers, a bottle-water brand, a short-lived airline,
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The Immanent Joy of Detrumpification
As the president graffitis his name to beloved institutions and builds monuments to his own vanity, we must focus on how much fun it will be to tear it all down.
By Matt Ford | Dec 20, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/204699/detrumpification-will-be-very-f
un
There was no shortage of bad news to cover in 2025. But I want to end the year by looking to the future and focusing on something more joyous: detrumpification. I spent most of this year—indeed, most of this last decade—thinking about one man. Now, for just a moment, I want to think about what comes after him.
One day, likely by January 20, 2029, Donald Trump will no longer be the president of the United States. The Constitution will bar him from seeking a third term, no matter what nonsense Alan Dershowitz plans to soon publish. It is highly probable that Trump will be replaced by a new Democratic president. America’s economic, social, and moral decline in just the last 11 months makes it unlikely that his successor will win the most votes in 2028.
That new president, whoever they happen to be, will face countless choices about how to rebuild after Trump’s second term. Some things simply can’t be undone. The United States will likely never recover the full trust of our allies in Europe and Asia, who now know that another Trump is always at most four years away. Confidence in the rule of law in this country will remain shaken for generations, as will our reputation as a home for immigrants and a citadel of democratic and constitutional government.
Other damage will be repairable, but only with time and effort. Federal agencies will need to rehire thousands of civil servants to replace those purged by figures like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. Institutional knowledge at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more will need to be replenished. Funding for academic and scientific research will need to resume. There will be thousands of green-card applications to approve and hundreds of citizenship ceremonies to hold. Criminal investigations will need to be opened, and antitrust litigation must begin again.
For now I want to focus on the less impactful but highly symbolic aspects of detrumpification. It will not be enough to simply reverse Trump’s policies or unwind his executive orders when a new Democratic president takes office. The next administration must commit itself in addition to purging the aesthetic rot of Trump’s second term from our national life. Detrumpification must be celebrated as an act of victory and an exercise in joy.
Take, for example, Trump’s campaign against the Kennedy Center. Congress created the cultural center in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and designated it by law as a “living memorial” for John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. The famed stages and theaters along the Potomac have hosted some of the greatest artists from the United States and from around the world.
Trump has spent most of 2025 desecrating the place. First he purged most of the board that governs the institution. Then he replaced its members with pliable ideologues and sycophantic cronies, capped off by installing himself as the new chairman. In recent months, Trump has been personally overseeing its cultural work. This week, his underlings sought to capstone their cultural vandalism by renaming the center itself.
“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Twitter this week. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.”
Even the North Korean regime might blanche at this narcissism. Far from “saving” the institut
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The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments Are In Danger
Trump and the Supreme Court are trying to bring back the Antebellum Constitution.
By Adam Serwer | December 21, 2025, 8:23 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/antebellum-constitution/6
85354/
Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up in a cell. Retes was detained overnight without any opportunity to call a lawyer or his family.
“No one deserves to be treated like this,” Retes told this magazine after his release. “To have no rights. It’s just crazy to think about—that they can just mask up and take someone off the street, no questions asked, and you’re just gone.”
Read: A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story
Retes is one of an estimated 170 American citizens who have been detained by federal immigration agents as part of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, according to ProPublica, which warns that the count is both incomplete and unofficial because the federal government is not documenting its own abuses of power. https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-a
rrested-detained-against-will
At least 20 of those citizens, ProPublica found, had been detained overnight and incommunicado—a violation of their constitutional rights. When questioned about these detentions, Trump-administration officials claimed that the citizens had assaulted federal agents—an assertion proved false in many cases by video evidence or an inability by the government to produce serious charges reflecting the accusations. (One thrown sandwich hardly counts.)
Across the country, federal agents are flagrantly and casually disregarding Americans’ due-process rights. And they have been remarkably forthright about how they choose their victims. As Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a white reporter: Agents were arresting people based on “the particular characteristics of an individual—how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”
In Memphis, Reggie Williams told ProPublica that he was instructed by federal agents to keep his ID on him going forward, as though Black residents of the city were emancipated slaves forced to carry freedom papers lest they be kidnapped and returned to bondage. Bovino said basically the same thing after federal agents assaulted a Somali American citizen and refused to free him for hours despite his offers to show them a photo of his passport on his phone: “One must carry immigration documents,” Bovino posted on X. In Chicago, Maria Greeley was zip-tied by federal agents coming off a double shift at the bar where she worked. She had her passport and showed it to them, and still they detained her because, she said, she did not “look like” a Greeley.
This is racial profiling. And the Supreme Court has declined to stop it.
In September, an emergency docket decision effectively permitted this racial profiling by lifting a court order preventing it. “The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurrence. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be a “relevant factor,” he continued. “Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”
What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
https://www.threads.com/@pilarmiami/post/DSGs1ExjA4P/i-dont-know-who-to-give-credit-for-this-quote-but-it-rings-so-true-im-no-support
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I was amazed how many sick and hateful people there are myself. Clearly a third of this country is off its nut.
T
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Shut up, bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, you prove this point. I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump has not delivered on his promise that people would have more cash left over in their wallets. The economic boom he predicted has failed to materialize, as prices continue to rise and unemployment edges upward. The mood in the country is turning.
Americans Did Not Let Joe Biden Get Away with Being So Out of Touch
Only a quarter of Americans are satisfied with their economic circumstances. Everyone else feels like they are just about keeping their heads above water, or not even that. In short, it’s precisely the situation Trump’s predecessor faced well over a year ago. The mood was lousy then, and it’s turning just as sour now.
Trump risks falling into the same trap as his predecessor. Like Biden before him, he is now trying to convince his fellow Americans that the situation is better than they perceive it to be. Trump’s televised speech was a bizarre blend of exaggerations, half-truths and lies. Inflation has not fallen, as he claims. And no one who drove their car to the gas station the next day believes gas prices are back at the level they were two decades ago. Americans were not inclined to let Biden get away with being so out of touch; Trump is now running the same risk.
https://watchingamerica.com/2025/12/20/trump-risks-falling-into-the-sa
me-trap-as-his-predecessor/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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MAGA’s Manly Manufacturing Misfire
Understanding Trump’s other big failure
By Paul Krugman | Dec 22, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-manly-manufacturing-misfire
According to Navigator Research, a significant number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 now regret their choice. As the word cloud above suggests, this regret is largely driven by Trump’s utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.
What did he promise? Most media attention has focused on his claim that he would bring the cost of living way down, starting on “day one.” This claim never made any sense, especially because Trump’s policy agenda — centered on tariffs and mass deportation — was clearly inflationary, not deflationary. And Trump isn’t improving his standing with his reality denial “affordability” tour, which will clearly take the form of multiple speeches in which he demands that Americans reject the evidence of their own eyes and admit that prices are falling, not rising.
But while Trump’s gaslighting on prices is a natural and appropriate target for critics, we shouldn’t forget that the main goal of his policy agenda wasn’t lower prices, it was job creation. Specifically, Trump and his economic advisers claimed — and may even have believed — that they would create lots of manly jobs for manly men. They would revive American manufacturing, they claimed, by unilaterally imposing huge tariffs and thereby breaking all our international agreements (and, whatever the Supreme Court may say, U.S. law). They would create mining and construction jobs, they claimed, by killing renewable energy and gutting environmental protection in order to promote fossil fuels. They would deport millions of undocumented workers which would result, they claimed, in a job boom for native-born workers.
My snark about “manly” jobs isn’t gratuitous. Mike Konczal has an excellent review of the way the MAGA labor market story has failed, in which he emphasizes how regressively gendered Trump’s vision was and is:
I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.
Let me acknowledge, by the way, that U.S. men are having real problems. But nothing Trump is doing will help.
And even on its own absurd terms, the MAGA jobs strategy has been an abject failure — as abject as Trump’s failure to bring down prices. Here are the current official employment numbers for manufacturing, construction and employment:
Contrary to Trumpist claims that the Biden expansion didn’t create “real” jobs, the economy added a substantial number of jobs in “manly” sectors from 2021 to 2024. Part of this expansion was driven by Biden’s green energy policies, which boosted both construction and manufacturing employment.
Trump has scrapped Biden’s green energy policies in favor of tariffs and fossil fuels. But it isn’t working. Instead, employment in “manly” sectors has fallen since Trump took office. And as Dean Baker points out, there are strong reasons to believe that even these job numbers are overstated, and will eventually be revised down further.
I’ll talk about the failure of Trump’s dirty energy strategy to create jobs on another occasion. For now, let’s talk about why tariffs aren’t reviving manufacturing.
Fundamentally, Trump and those who have his ear, especially Peter Navarro, his trade czar, made two big mistakes. First, they didn’t do the math. Second, they failed to understand the nature of modern international trade.
When I say that they didn’t do the math, I mean that as far as I can tell nobody with Trump’s ear made any eff
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, you prove this point. I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.
You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.
You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, I don't have an archive on you. However, I have vast experience with people like you and Trump, people who talk too much and know too little. It has never ended happily for your kind. It won't end well for either you or Trump. It makes me calm and content to know that what happened to all those fucked up people I knew, who either died screaming because of their own stupid way of life or are dying horribly right now, is a preview of what will happen to you two fucked up people.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.
You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.
You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.
Trump trap: Epistemic arrogance
Dec 7 | Written By Lee Crumbaugh
From the lens of social science and economics we can easily see that Donald Trump is a poster child for mental traps and biases that get in the way of strategic thinking and rational decision-making. While Trump has made millions of dollars, attained celebrity status and won the U.S. presidency either in spite of or because of his decisions and behavior, we can make the case that the mental traps and biases he continues to exhibit are leading to bad outcomes for him and for us. By examining the traps and biases that Trump seems to display, we can see where we, as fellow humans, are likewise affected, albeit most often less dramatically, by these very same mental traps and biases.
https://www.forrestconsult.com/blog/trump-trap-epistemic-arrogance
___________________
6 Things People with Low Intelligence Often Think Are Great Ideas
Overconfidence in one's abilities often signals a lack of self-awareness. Those with low intelligence may feel the need to assert their superiority in intellectual matters, believing they know more than everyone else. This arrogance often stems from insecurity rather than actual knowledge.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/6-things-people-with-low-intell
igence-often-think-are-great-ideas/ss-AA1SJn1Z?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=98e93d58f32b4126950b37bebce4cbee&ei=11#image=2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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