Donald Trump’s tax breaks to Americans add up to about $1 trillion per quarter, and overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest. It is no surprise, then, that the wealthiest are thanking him with relatively modest contributions to the new White House ballroom. There are numerous calls for the next president to tear it down once this régime has finally been beaten. But there is a far better use for Trump’s ballroom than rebuilding the East Wing.
The Second World War got its name before its conclusion. As with references to “World War III” today, the first documented references to “World War II” took place before the first shots were even fired.
The Holocaust, the end result of a program of mass deportation of “undesirable” peoples from Germany and its conquered lands resulting in the death of some 10 million people, 6 million of which were Jews, did not settle on the widespread use of the permanent name “the Holocaust” until 1978, more than a generation after it had taken place.
There is not yet a commonly accepted name for the current American descent into fascism, nor the related global instability taking place that could result in a wider conflagration. We don’t yet know the end result, but we do know that Trump and his Christian fundamentalist and oligarchic backers are changing the structure of the world’s military and financial alliances, and that hot wars such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine could easily form the basis of a full-blown World War III.
More concerning is the creation of a rapidly growing secret police, concentration camps, and mass deportations, all of which are familiar from earlier examples. It is clear that the United States has, at the very least, entered a new and definable era. It is significantly larger than simply the Trump or MAGA era; there is structural rot that has allowed them to happen. Calling it the unchecked corporatist era, or the American fascist era, or even the American-led Rapture does not adequately capture what is going on.
For the moment, though, we’ll call it the MAGA Era, in spite of its far deeper roots.
Following World War II, Germany in particular went through a profound era of introspection they now call Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Teaching about the rise and effects of the Nazi régime is required in schools. There are dozens of Holocaust memorials across the country. The contrition of the nation is abject; there is no suppression of their country’s past.
There would be no more fitting building for a post-authoritarian United States, contrite over its participation in this experiment in fascism, than to build the American Museum of MAGAism in that wide open space of the Trump ballroom.
Attached, as it will be, to the rest of the White House, it will be an inescapable symbol for its future occupants. Making it a museum about the rise and fall of fascism in the United States, open to the public and, like the nearby Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, free to visit, it will truly be a peoples’ museum.
It will necessarily document the parallel rise of the oligarchy and Christian fundamentalism.
It will take us from the building of the middle class through FDR’s New Deal through World War II and the post-war boom, through Reaganomics and the collapse of that middle class as the oligarchy invented non-sensical concepts like trickle-down economics to syphon the wealth of the nation, while buying out every aspect of the media environment to prevent the public from seeing and understanding what was going on.
It will take us from slavery through the Jim Crow laws through the pro-life movement showing how racism drove the division of the country. It will document how the oligarchy used it to brandish control of the religious right to use that perceived racial superiority as the structural support allowing the theft of the nation’s wealth while offering someone else to blame.
It will document how Donald Trump tied all the pieces together and threw out all pretence of democracy to seize total control of the country, its economy, its relationships, its people, to serve his own interests and those of the oligarchy he served.
It will house the daily documentary work of historian Heather Cox Richardson, it will build on the Trump actions database of Christina Pagel, and it will display the diary of a child currently hiding from ICE in someone’s attic whose identity we do not yet know.
More to the point, any future President in the White House who wants to try again will first need to shut down the American Museum of MAGAism, visible outside their window, a constant reminder of the past. It will serve as a tripwire for the intentions of its occupant, and be a museum with a purpose as significant as the Holocaust memorials across Germany.
Trump is building his ballroom. Removing it will be to erase a dark era in American history. Use it, instead, to prevent a Trump from ever happening again.
One can interpret this article as a sign of hope, a vision of a United States post MAGA. That is a vision to uphold, a survival of the country and its return to a stability: United States understanding itself as just another country in the family of the world.
A vision to cherish.
Germany was forced into a Truth, Reconciliation and Restitution process after losing two "World Wars".
It wasn't only about the "Third Reich", but unfortunately far too many people elsewhere have narrowed their understanding of the problem down to one government and one individual as leader.
What do you believe will spark the process for the USA? It feels to me like, once this specific regime ends, that the USA won't have any reason to do anything other than to point fingers away from itself toward one leader and government, and claim that otherwise the USA "Remains Great".