Over the course of his second term, President Donald Trump has been fixated on his wide-ranging D.C. construction projects, from his much-demanded ballroom to his 250-foot-tall arch to the Reflecting Pool debacle, and more. While he has claimed it is all part of an effort to clean up the nation’s “dirty and disgusting” capital, according to one leading psychologist, Trump’s motivations are more ethereal: the president is attempting to create his own post-death mythology.
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This is according to neuroscientist Frank George, who posted a video on Tuesday explaining Trump’s desire to “redesign history.”
“Trump no longer seems content to be remembered as a successful president,” asserts George. “Increasingly, he portrays himself as something much larger: founder, savior, timeless hero, even the embodiment of the nation itself.”
The president frequently takes to social media to post AI-generated images of himself alongside the nation’s founders and symbols, and even of himself as Jesus. According to George, however, “Those AI images aren’t telling this story alone. The physical environment has been telling it for months. The oversized ballroom. The monumental arches. The endless gold. The portraits. The banners hanging from buildings.”
As George explains, “Architecture is a symbolic communication. Throughout history, rulers have understood that buildings tell stories long after speeches are forgotten.” Washington D.C. is full of such buildings and monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, both of which were established to help craft the nation’s sense of history and identity — and both of which, argue critics, would be loomed over by Trump’s arch. George argues that Trump’s goal is precisely that: to impose his own “history” and “mythology” on the country.
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“This isn’t about construction,” warns George. “They’re attempts to make mythology tangible. Trump doesn’t want to occupy history. Increasingly, he’s redesigning history to occupy him.”
George wasn’t the only one with such thoughts on his mind on Tuesday. Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the highly conservative magazine the National Review, posted a quote from Maggie Haberman, whose recent bestseller Regime Change exposed a slew of embarrassing secrets about Trump and the White House.
“If you looked at, like, a chart of [Trump’s] mind share,” said Haberman, “like 70 percent of it would be on his renovations.”
“You don’t have to buy Haberman’s figure,” Geraghty responded, “but it’s undeniable that President Trump spends a lot of time thinking and talking about the White House ballroom project, the Reflecting Pool renovation, and his ‘independence arch.’ That possessive word is deliberate; in October, when a reporter asked whom the arch was for, Trump responded, ‘Me.’”
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