Of Mice and Monuments

By Mike Nelson

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

I recently observed a conversation on X between The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg and another user wherein they agreed the recent fight over the Kennedy Center, and President Donald Trump’s persistent desire to emblazon his name somewhere thereupon, mattered less beyond the Beltway than it does to local residents. Jonah made the correct point that this does not change the degree to which Trump is attempting to use illegal and impulsive means to do what he did in New York for decades—putting his name on buildings. It is true that the Kennedy Center is not high on the list of locations Americans visit when traveling to the nation’s capital. Nor does it have the same cultural significance nationally as the White House, which is also in the midst of its own transformation and associated legal battle based primarily on Trump’s whims. Likewise, many have raised aesthetic objections to the president’s planned triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, and those objections should be addressed, but most of America probably does not share my primary objection to the project—that it will gum up traffic for an undetermined period of time in a place that already has one of the worst-conceived traffic patterns outside of Europe or the Middle East. Admittedly, this objection is primarily based in self-interest as one with a morning commute.

 

But while these vanity projects may matter to varying degrees to the wider American public, that doesn’t mean we should hand-wave away the lawless and reckless impulses behind them. Nor should we discount the larger lessons we can infer about the president’s decision-making—patterns he replicates on matters of much greater import.

 

Character is destiny, and Trump’s personal traits ultimately determine how he approaches decisions—and all of us, largely, form the neural patterns we use to make choices and process information through our early-life experiences. A key difference between the president and others, however, is that he seems not to want additional information in helping shape his decisions, especially when that information is contrary to his impulsive wishes. And the voices that might have interjected and presented him with opposing information are practically nonexistent compared with his first term. The president relies almost solely on either gut instinct or personal desires; when he has made good decisions in the past, it was almost purely out of chance.

 

While Trump’s decision-making is an issue in itself, his follow-through only exacerbates the problem. The president’s decisions will be proclaimed either in an aside during a press spray or in a late-night social media post, and thus become a critical goal to be pursued by the government.

 

Trump will tell the American people we face an urgent problem with an obvious solution, one that had not been dealt with previously because all those who preceded him (theoretically including the 45^th occupant of the office) were stupid, lazy, or corrupt. He will proclaim the fix will be cheap, fast, and amazing—and that only he could ever make it happen. He makes announcements without even the slightest research into what would be needed—physically, legally, or otherwise—to accomplish his goals and refuses to build consensus among partners and allies. Then, when confronted with reality, he either loses interest, abandoning the project and anything broken along the way (e.g., the many times he has TACO’d), refuses to accept the new information and steamrolls ahead extrajudicially with his desire (e.g., the ballroom), or impetuously decides to break things more, throwing a fit and whining that if he can’t get his way, so everyone pays (e.g., the Kennedy Center).

 

If this pattern were limited to just design choices in and around Washington, D.C., we might be able to just shake our heads at a petty, childish narcissist for whom there will never be enough portraits, commemorative coins, banners bearing his visage on government buildings, or structures upon which to etch his name. But the impulsive lurching from shiny object to shiny object is not limited to architectural choices within the national capital region. The president has engaged in a shooting war with Iran and a trade war with the world, both seemingly out of thin air, neither with coordination or approval from Congress, neither with a clear end state or plan, and both exacerbating the inflationary and affordability issues he campaigned on solving.

 

Trump loudly proclaimed he would end the Ukraine war—the largest European conflict since WWII—in a single day, only to throw up his hands in frustration when faced with the complexities the rest of the world clearly saw. He has gone from boasts about being a master dealmaker whom the rest of the world listens to and respects to saying—in the cases of the Ukraine and Iran wars—that he’s lost interest in a deal. He then talks about the conflicts as though he is a casual observer, not someone who inserted himself into the middle of the former and initiated the latter. He has made many situations worse by firing off ideas with middle-school-level comprehension skills, leaving those who have been in the midst of the issues wondering whether to take the recommendations seriously, literally, or some other way.

 

One can be forgiven for forgetting many of his outrageous ideas over the last year and a half, but it’s important to remember that, beyond suggesting that we might make Canada, Greenland, or Venezuela U.S. possessions, Trump had also seriously proposed American ownership of Gaza and mass forced relocation of those living there, for the purpose of creating a Middle Eastern resort destination. They say there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, but perhaps we in the United States would benefit from a few steps between “the president has an out-of-the-box idea” and “the president announces his crazy idea to the world seconds later.”

 

And then there are the retroactive justifications developed to explain the urgency of the president’s desires once he realizes that just saying “I want” is not sufficient to marshal popular support—outside of his loyal army of influencers who spare no shame in leaping to demand he be given his heart’s wildest desires. The ballroom and proposed triumphal arch are now, apparently, essential to national security, and anyone not supporting them must hate the troops and America and is an obvious communist, right? Likewise, the Iran war, a conflict initiated without clear cause, criteria, consensus, or conclusion, went through a series of different explanations—coming to the aid of protesters, finally settling the 47-year conflict with Iran, etc.—before the now settled-upon message that the war is about preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon. In the White House’s implication, anyone who raises questions about the war is enabling Iran in its nuclear desires. It matters not, in this reasoning, that the United States has done little to physically target the nuclear program in this round of conflict and may have hardened Iran’s resolve to join the nuclear club as a deterrent to future attacks of this sort. Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 indeed damaged Iran’s nuclear aspirations, something for which I gave the administration credit at the time. In hindsight, it seems that was likely less the result of a sober and reasoned decision and more the consequence, as has been widely reported, of the president’s envy over positive headlines from Israel’s strikes against Iran in the days prior.

 

During the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention and storage of unauthorized classified material at Mar-a-Lago after his first term, many people were quick to assign a nefarious motive to the president’s actions—that he had kept the material in order to sell it to foreign actors. While Trump has shown no qualms about blending public policy with private profit, I think it’s a stretch to accuse him of this specifically without evidence. Sometimes the most realistic explanation is much simpler. C.J. Ciaramella posited what became known as the “my boxes” theory—Trump wanted to keep the material because he viewed the documents as his own cool souvenirs, and didn’t feel the need to explain it to anyone. We can see this same decision-making playing out in the second Trump admin, in matters of structures or strategies—be it “my monuments,” “my tariffs,” or “my Iran war.” Trump wants it because he wants it.

 

As we all watch the various squabbles and suits about Trump’s many construction projects play out, we should not forget that each tantrum and outburst is more than just the dramatic spasms of an incredible narcissist obsessed with using public authority to compel honors and adulation—these are case studies into the mind and character of the man twice entrusted with greater power than anyone else on earth.

 

No law, tradition, or priority will give the president pause in his pursuit of personal desires, and in the cases where the obstacles to achieving them are too onerous for him to overcome, there is no second thought given to the damage done in the wake. And, like another who sought to create an enduring legacy through monuments and statues, our modern-day Ozymandias is establishing how he will be remembered—but, just like the subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, in a very different way than he believes.