Trump put a wrecking-ball through the East Wing – and through democratic norms | Francine Prose

Our children should be able to visit our nation’s capital without having to think about Donald Trump and about how much he did to deface it History has shown us how much dictators and aspiring dictators love building monuments to themselves. They enjoy reminding the world that they can do anything, no matter who is responsible for the physical labor or who will be paying the financial and human cost. They prefer outsized structures, heroic arches, towers and columns designed to prove that their signature and their esthetic will be with us forever, even after they’re dead, though dictators often seem to believe they are too powerful to die. There’s a chilling photograph of Hitler in the bunker beneath Berlin, not long before his suicide, contemplating an architectural model of the Austrian city of Linz which he had intended (and perhaps still intended) to rebuild to his specifications. In Tirana, Albania, is a bizarre glass pyramid that the tyrant Enver Hoxha constructed as a museum about his life, and in which he is now buried. In Rome’s EUR, Mussolini and his city planners designed a neighborhood scaled for the race of Fascist giants to which they imagined they belonged. S