Don’t Demolish Trump’s Monstrosity. Demolition is for cowards.
Convert it into “The Trumpsonian,” an immersive anti-monument that preserves the truth of the Trump era and reminds would-be kings that America bows to no one.
I’m standing in the shadow of Donald Trump’s newest monument to himself. A construction crane claws at what used to be the White House East Wing, tearing history apart brick by brick. The air smells like concrete dust and ego. Inside, behind velvet ropes and marble columns, wait the 90,000 square feet of pure ostentation that Trump insisted on - a $300 million ballroom so excessive it makes Versailles look like a Denny’s.
This is Trump’s Palace of Lies in Washington, DC - built with Big Tech and defense contractor money, no less.1 Apple, Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin - even the widow of casino king Sheldon Adelson - all lined up to foot the bill for this monstrosity. In secret and without shame, the president’s crews gutted an entire wing of the People’s House in a matter of days, as if our national heritage were just another old casino to be imploded. It’s the perfect symbol of his presidency: massive, tacky, paid for by billionaires, and fundamentally hostile to the very idea of democracy. Obama once joked in 2011 about a “Trump White House Hotel & Casino” with gold pillars and a giant chandelier - well, here we are. The joke is real, a glittering shrine to one man’s delusions of grandeur.
But hear me out: instead of tearing down this grotesque ballroom when Trump is gone, let’s do something truly radical. Let’s hijack his temple of vanity and turn it into a living, roaring museum of truth. Name it The Trumpsonian. Make it a permanent, immersive exhibit so raw and unflinching that Trump and his followers will absolutely hate it - an anti-monument sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue like a cyst of reality on the face of his legacy. We’ll transform those gold-plated halls into a carnival of receipts - every lie, every grift, every act of cruelty preserved in interactive infamy. Instead of a monument to Trump’s ego, it becomes a monument against everything he stands for. Call it civic jiu-jitsu: we use the weight of his own hubris to pin him down for posterity.
The Trumpsonian: A Palace of Truth and Satire
Envision this: you walk through the grand double doors of The Trumpsonian - formerly Trump’s prized ballroom - and plunge into a fever dream of the last decade. The first thing to greet you is the gleam of a golden toilet under a spotlight, a perfect recreation of the infamous Mar-a-Lago bathroom. Stacks of “Top Secret” files teeter next to the bowl, just like the FBI photos. Yes, you are invited to sit - throne-like - on that toilet, pose with classified documents, and feel the absurdity in your bones. Around the corner, the polished elegance of the White House dining room is reborn as the Ketchup Room, complete with a replica presidential dining table and a wall-sized Fox News screen. Go ahead - throw a plate. Watch ketchup drip down the wall in grotesque slow motion, a tribute to presidential temper tantrums that once splattered these very walls. In the Trumpsonian, nothing is sacred except the truth. We revel in the spectacle of exposing false idols.
Every exhibit hits like a punchline and a gut-punch. Here’s the Hall of Ignorance, where you can grab a Sharpie and redraw a hurricane on a weather map, or browse an “Apothecary of Quackery” stocked with bleach and ivermectin cures. The whole thing is a gleeful, hands-on indictment of willful stupidity in power. Next, step right up to the Carnival of Failure - a casino of broken promises. Pull the lever on a giant slot machine that never pays out, showering you in a blizzard of unpaid invoices and contractor liens from Trump’s bankrupt businesses. Pose with a diploma from the bogus Trump University under a neon sign that reads “Art of the Steal.” Every corner is selfie-ready and searingly factual, designed to let us laugh at the madness even as we document it for history’s sake.
And it only gets more intense. Farther in, past the funhouse gags, the Trumpsonian leads you down into the darker depths of the Trump era. The lights dim. You enter the Hall of Unindicted Co-Conspirators - a gallery of rogues styled as vintage wanted posters. Manafort, Stone, Bannon, Flynn - their grinning portraits line the walls under flickering neon that reads “Step 1: Work for Trump. Step 2: Go to Jail.” An illuminated scoreboard displays four criminal indictments, 91 charges, dozens of convictions - the official rap sheet of the Trump circle. Around the corner, you find the Creepy Room, a disturbingly quiet space where a tape of the Access Hollywood bus ride plays on loop. Silhouettes of pageant contestants flit by as you overhear the boasts of a sexual predator in his own words. No memes here, no laughs - just the cold, uncomfortable truth of what was normalized for far too long.
By the time you reach the final exhibits, the tone has shifted from carnivalesque to downright sobering. You’re handed a VR headset and suddenly you’re inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Not watching it on the news - inside it. The roar of the mob surrounds you. Men in tactical gear shove past, Confederate flags and MAGA hats blur in your peripheral vision. You hear glass shatter and shouts of “Hang Mike Pence!” as you follow a frantic Capitol Hill cop down a corridor. This is not a game; it’s a visceral VR insurrection experience that forces you to confront the terror of that day. When you take off the headset, your heart hammering, you’re faced with a life-sized “Where’s Waldo” style illustration of the Capitol. Your challenge: find the politicians who later downplayed the violence, the ones who still swear it was “just a normal tourist visit.” It’s dark satire with a razor’s edge - a reminder that even after the tear gas and blood, the gaslighting never stopped.
Finally, you emerge into the Hope Activation Zone - the Trumpsonian’s last room and beating heart. This isn’t a passive museum where you exit through a gift shop and forget. This is where we flip the script. All that rage and disbelief you’ve felt? Here you channel it into action. You see a giant interactive map of upcoming elections and a row of voter registration kiosks. On the wall, a mural of heroes: everyday Americans who stood up to the authoritarian tide - election workers like Ruby Freeman, Capitol police officers like Eugene Goodman. You add your name to the Pledge Wall, scrawling a promise to vote, volunteer, or simply speak up for truth. In that moment, you realize this place isn’t just about wallowing in the past - it’s about igniting a fire for the future. The Trumpsonian exists to make sure “Never Again” is more than a slogan.
An Anti-Monument with a Mission
What we’re proposing is more than a museum. It’s a civic immune response to an ongoing threat. Trump and his allies are already working overtime to rewrite history in real time - hell, he literally issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” as a pretext to purge museum exhibits he doesn’t like. Under that Orwellian banner, they are scrubbing away mentions of racism and oppression, demanding museums only celebrate a sugar-coated, MAGA-friendly version of America. He’s stacked the Smithsonian’s board with loyalists and put the squeeze on funding to force compliance. Over at the Kennedy Center - which he’s treated like his personal culture club - Trump fired respected arts leaders, banned drag performances by decree, and even tried to rename the damn institution after himself. (Yes, congressional sycophants actually pushed a bill to rebrand it the “Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts” - JFK’s ghost is screaming.) This is the authoritarian playbook: seize the culture, rewrite the story, and build monuments to the Leader.
Well, The Trumpsonian is our answer, our big, loud refusal. It flips Trump’s efforts on their head - using his own gaudy stage to broadcast the truth he wants to bury. Think of it as an anti-memorial. Traditional monuments honor leaders; this one indicts them. This isn’t about partisan politics or some niche art project. It’s about erecting a bulwark of truth in the heart of the capital, where everyone can see it. As one of our project advisors put it, the Trumpsonian isn’t just entertainment - it’s democracy defense infrastructure. We’re fortifying our collective memory against the lies. We’re saying to future presidents: go ahead and build yourself a golden palace - we’ll turn it into a public haunted house of your failures if you try to become a tyrant. The Trumpsonian will stand as a permanent reminder that in America, presidents are not kings and propaganda will not go unanswered.
And don’t mistake the satire here for triviality. Satire is a time-honored American weapon. Twain knew it, Whitman knew it, George Carlin and Samantha Bee know it. In dark times, sometimes only laughter can shake people awake. By immersing visitors in equal parts comedy and horror, this museum punches through apathy. It creates a visceral shared memory of what really happened - one TikTok and Instagram post at a time. Every visitor becomes a storyteller, amplifying the truth in an era of too many lies. As absurd as The Trumpsonian sounds, its social mission is deadly serious: preserve the truth, energize people to participate in democracy, and inoculate our culture against the virus of authoritarianism. If millions of Americans walk through this anti-monument and leave both entertained and outraged enough to act - that’s a win for the country.
Join the Resistance: Build the Museum America Deserves
Now, here’s the kicker: if Donald Trump can rustle up $300 million from tech titans and war profiteers to build a ballroom vanity project, then we the people can raise a mere $3 million to tell the truth. This is pocket change in political terms - one one-hundredth of Trump’s tab - yet it could change the narrative for generations. The Trumpsonian project is already being designed by a rogue band of patriots, satirists, and experiential artists (for safety, they’re mostly working anonymously - because challenging a wannabe tyrant tends to attract trolls and lawsuits). We have the expertise to pull this off, but we need an army of co-conspirators to ignite it. That means you.
Consider this an invitation and a challenge. Sign the pledge on our website to show that you believe in this cause - that you’ll be there on opening day, that you demand your elected officials support turning Trump’s folly into the people’s museum. If you can, donate a few bucks to fuel the first exhibits. Skip the latte tomorrow and toss $5 into the pot; hell, we’ll even send you a satirical “Covfefe Tweet” thank-you for the price of a coffee. Got $150 to spare? We’ll mail you your very own “Classified Documents Starter Pack” - complete with a faux Top-Secret folder for your bathroom, so you too can feel like a rogue ex-president. These tongue-in-cheek donor rewards remind us that this isn’t a stuffy nonprofit gala - it’s a guerilla act of citizen outrage. Every ticket we sell and every dollar we raise is a thumb in the eye of those who would lie to us. As our manifesto says: Every dollar you pledge helps us not only tell the story of the past but actively shape the future.
Imagine a future where school groups tour the Trumpsonian on field trips, learning through immersive shock therapy what happens when democracy is taken for granted. Imagine foreign tourists visiting DC - they’ll see the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space, and then this, the museum that America built to stare down a would-be dictator. Imagine the message that sends. This is how we ensure that the Trump era is remembered not with rose-colored glasses, but with sirens and flashing red lights, as a warning. It’s how we inspire the next generation to safeguard the republic.
Trump wanted a monument - we’ll give him an anti-monument. He wants to rewrite history - we’ll write it honestly, in giant letters on his own walls. He wants to crown himself a king - we’ll show future presidents the guillotine of public accountability (figuratively speaking, of course). This is our moment to reclaim the narrative with art, with satire, with unflinching truth.
History is watching. The bulldozers are rumbling, and the time for sitting on the sidelines is over. If you’re tired of feeling helpless while madmen build golden palaces, then help us transform one into a beacon of truth. The Trumpsonian can be that beacon - but only if we build it. So sign the pledge. Spread the word. Call your Congress member and tell them you want the Trumpsonian established as the people’s museum in our capital. We have the plans, the passion, and yes, the guts. What we need now is the power of the people behind us.
Trump’s grotesque ballroom can either remain a monument to lies or become a living testament to truth and democracy. The choice is ours, and the time is now. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Help us build the museum America deserves. Pledge now.