STOP ALL THIS. WE DON’T WANT A GOLDEN CALF. OR HIS GOLDEN MONUMENTS.

Question. Shouldn’t a president hellbent on building, modifying, rearranging, rewriting, rebuilding his own small vision of what constitutes the proper aesthetic and/or version of history at least be required to finish one project well before he gets to start a dozen more? The Trump administration is about to paint one of DC’s icons of architecture, the massive granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It’s granite folks. It is built to never need painting. Putting paint on natural stone is an idiot’s dream. Just ask the Reflecting Pool. But Trump is dead set on this project. Along with a Memorial Arch that will destroy the historically designed landscape of DC. The arch will tower over the landscape, destroying the intended homage to one of our history’s worst periods. And deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America. Instead we’ll be regaled with a cheap knockoff version of something Trump no doubt saw in his Authoritarian Handbook. Which will most certainly require untold future work just to keep it standing. It’ll turn out to be nothing but a shoddy, rushed facade that will add nothing but cost us much. That sounds about right. Behind closed doors, the Trump administration is busily handing control over every single historical site and monument and landmark over to the control of the Executive. This means he will be able to fiddle with, tear down, modify, repaint, and drill anywhere his whim takes him. He’s already torn down the East Wing. And where’s that mythical Ballroom? Here’s an example of what’s to come. The administration wants to open the ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, NM, to development. Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance. The buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites. But the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move forward the revisions to allow complete Executive control over our every historical everything. Chaco. Grand Canyon. Yosemite. Everything. Mount Rushmore. So you know where that might be heading. NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8M sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.” This is just another example of how trust is the basic glue that holds a society together. We, perhaps naively, trust that people in power will at the very least take care of those symbols of America we all know and hold sacred and presume will always hold a place in our collective history. Now even that notion is being defiled. Cheapened. And gilded.