Trump gets stark history lesson over monument obsession from expert

President Donald Trump has spent much of his second term so far scrambling to add his name, or some other mark, onto America's national monuments, from the Kennedy Center to the White House, to even replacing Martin Luther King Jr. Day with his own birthday for free admission into national parks.

It's an impulse shared by many dictators and autocrats around the world, wrote Keith Richburg for The Washington Post, as they all seek to leave a permanent manifestation of their own will and their impact on the nation.

"Kenya, where I lived from 1991 to 1994, was ruled for 24 years by 'Big Man' authoritarian president Daniel arap Moi," wrote Richburg. "A major downtown Nairobi street was named Moi Avenue. A sculpture in Nairobi’s Central Park displayed what appeared to be a replica of his fist, clutching his characteristic 'rungu' baton, bursting through the top of Mount Kenya. His face graced every banknote and coin. One day in October, I was planning to run errands but found all the banks and offices closed; I didn’t realize it was 'Moi Day,' a national holiday."

But "nothing lasts forever," wrote Richburg. These monuments are rarely as permanent as autocrats imagine they will be — and Trump is likely no exception.

"When the regimes finally crumble — and they eventually do — those statues and portraits become the first, most visible targets of suppressed rage," he wrote. "Think of the statue of Saddam being pulled down in Baghdad. In Basra, southern Iraq, after the regime fell, I saw one giant poster of Saddam dressed in a traditional kaffiyeh, with his mouth shot out. Across Syria after the December 2024 revolution, statues of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, were reduced to rubble. In the Philippines, a giant likeness of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos carved out of a mountainside was later blown up with dynamite. When Mobutu fell in Zaire, the locals carved his face out of the banknotes."

All of Trump's changes, from his name and banner on federal buildings to his dictate for Cabinet members to wear shoes he gives them, are "mostly corruption and vanity at work, rather than coercion and terror," concluded Richburg. "Leaders come and eventually go, and many of their garish tributes to themselves end up on history’s junk pile — or become lasting monuments to their ridiculousness. Trump will be no different."