U.S. President Donald Trump unveils his Ratepayer Protection Pledge, aimed at shielding households from electricity costs tied to the AI boom, at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 23, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump's effort to leave his fingerprints around the U.S. bears a striking resemblance to a sordid part of American history, according to a new analysis.
Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump's "vanity projects" — which range from the renaming of Palm Beach Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport to the roads and bridges named after him by Republican state legislatures — resemble the efforts to erect Confederate monuments. He argued that the monuments to Trump, much like the Confederate ones, will become a sort of "cultural litmus test" that divides the country long after Trump is gone.
"Trump’s efforts to plant permanent stink bombs in Washington are only a part of the story," Litman wrote, referring to Trump's beautification projects in Washington, D.C. "States and localities have learned, along with every world leader, that the way to curry favor with Trump is to dedicate landmarks to him, the gaudier the better."
He added that the most discouraging part of Trump's vanity projects is the impact they are likely to have on generations to come.
"The discouraging prospect is that we see the same ongoing national bitterness as with the Confederate monuments, the source of sharp divides that still plague us more than a century and a half after the end of the Civil War," Litman added. "Those statues were mostly erected not in the smoke of the war but decades later, in the Jim Crow years and again during the civil rights movement. They hardened into a sort of cultural litmus test, along the same dispiriting red-blue lines that the country seems unable to move past. And so will it be for the Trump monuments sprinkled around the country."
"The shadow and stench of Trump will be on the land, as it were, for many moons after we are rid of him—and with it some measure of the polarization and the bitterness among competing tribes," he wrote. "That’s his bequest to a country desperate to be done with him. Like so many pathologically insecure men, he would rather be resented forever than forgotten at all."