One day last week as I was driving on Constitution Avenue in downtown D.C., the word “Trump” flashed by in my peripheral vision. I whipped my head around for a better look and saw the name on the front of an imposing public building, but because the traffic was moving quickly, I could discern no further detail. But as far as I knew, Trump’s name was not on any public building in the capital. I soon discovered, though, that what I had seen was the façade of the United States Institute of Peace, renamed this month the “Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.”
On Thursday came the news that the Donald Trump-appointed board of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts had renamed the venerable institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” (“The Trump Kennedy Center” in short).
Trump’s foisting of his name upon the Institute of Peace — while he is in court against the institute’s board contending that he has the right to control the congressionally created and funded entity — caused barely a ripple in the public consciousness nationally. But his soiling of the Kennedy Center with his name has been a different matter. On Thursday, the day the outrage was announced, I logged on to the Kennedy Center website and for the first time found myself in a queue waiting to reach the homepage. Such was the public consternation. People were flocking to the website to see whether the reported abomination really was true. And the center claimed the heavy traffic was related to the Kennedy Center Honors. A lie, I am certain.
In the same week, we had another demonstration of Donald Trump’s significant mental illness. At the White House, he altered a gallery of past presidents’ portraits by adding to selected pictures brass plaques with insulting versions of those predecessors’ biographies. He reserved special venom for Joe Biden, Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton. (Yes, he included Obama’s middle name as he always does when he wants to sound his anti-Muslim dog whistle.) And although Hillary Clinton was never president or even vice president, he managed to work her in on her husband’s plaque and on his own plaque, the latter of which is full of self-praise and celebrates his defeat of her in the 2016 presidential election. What president who is sane would do something like this?
During the 2016 presidential campaign, I was a Multiplatform editor at The Washington Post, I tried to nudge a senior national reporter there to address somehow — the Goldwater rule notwithstanding — the glaring issue of Donald Trump’s mental defects. My then-colleague did not budge. And no other legacy media houses would touch what everyone knew was an important issue in the campaign and in the nation: Was Donald Trump suffering from a mental illness, and was he under the care of a psychiatrist?
Here we are in 2025, coming up on one full year of Trump’s second term, and we have no idea what outrageous behavior he will use to fill the three remaining years of his term, if, indeed, the good Lord allows him all of that time.
Trump seems to be on a mission to defile every sacred thing he can identify and to push past every reasonable restraint and boundary and to frolic in the badlands beyond. This mad adventure now includes gathering up honors to which he has no entitlement, including putting his name on public buildings. And he is being abetted by battalions of bootlickers: FIFA with its ridiculous inaugural peace prize awarded to the clown; the imposter Kennedy Center board that sullied the great memorial to Kennedy by adding the clown’s name to the Kennedy Center building.
Worst of all, though, is the abetting of Trump by the Republican Congress. With the exception of House and Senate leaders, all representatives and senators are paid a base salary of $174,000 a year. I submit to you, dear reader, that on the Republican side, that money is being lost to a form of honest services fraud. Congress has a duty to be a check on the executive branch. Congress is not beholden to the executive branch, and Congress is the first line of defense against an out-of-control executive. But Congress is in the hands of the GOP, and those Republicans as a whole are a bunch of spiritless cowards.
To stand up to Trump and hold him accountable could cost many of them their political careers, because the mangy MAGA base would turn on them like rabid dogs. But these politicians have a sworn obligation to the country to defy such political hazards. Instead of standing up, though, an increasing number of them are simply creeping away into retirement. Elise Stefanik, Republican representative of New York’s 21 Congressional District, is the latest to announce her exit. She became one of the busiest stokers in the engine of the Trump train, but what did Donald Trump do? He used her like a mat in a mud room and left her dirty and unsatisfied. The promised job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations? Withdrawn on a whim because he needed her to remain in the House of Representatives to bolster Speaker Mike Johnson’s deathly thin Republican majority.
Now she is also out of the race for governor of the state of New York. She had no chance of winning against the incumbent governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, or possibly even winning a Republican primary to secure her party’s official nomination for the position. And Trump was not exactly moving heaven and earth to lift her campaign. Gratitude and loyalty, Trump-style.
But back to the GOP in Congress. Some are leaving because they know what is coming. The country has grown sick of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party is going to suffer an epic beating in the midterm elections in November 2026. And that will be a precursor to a Democratic landslide in the presidential election in 2028. The Republicans who are slinking out of Congress are no less accountable for Trump than the ones who are keeping their heads down and staying with the hope of surviving the coming ass-kicking in November. All are responsible for their own cowardice and for their complicity with Trump, who is their very own lunatic.
In January 2027, we will swear in a Democratic-majority Congress that will start holding Donald Trump accountable. And it should start by removing his name from the Kennedy Center and any other public institution that that piece of obscenity still soils in that glorious month of American rebirth.
Democracy Warrior 
Right on target again my good man.
LikeLike