Let us not mince words. The removal of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center is not an act of justice. It is an act of vandalism dressed in judicial robes. A court order, we are told, has purged the 45th president from the hallowed halls of American culture. Meanwhile, British cultural leaders—our own sanctimonious arbiters of taste—have rushed to denounce this as ‘political interference’. As if they wouldn’t do the same if Boris Johnson had a bust in the Royal Opera House.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence, a period that mirrors the late Roman Empire in its obsession with symbolic purity and its neglect of substantive decay. The Romans, too, spent centuries scrubbing names from monuments. They called it damnatio memoriae: the condemnation of memory. Emperors like Nero and Domitian were erased from inscriptions, their statues melted down. And what did it achieve? Nothing. The empire still fell. The barbarians still came. The only difference is that today’s barbarians arrive not with swords but with court orders and press releases.
Consider the irony. The Kennedy Center is a shrine to John F. Kennedy, a man whose presidency was a masterclass in style over substance. He gave us the lunar landing programme, yes, but also the Bay of Pigs and a thousand days of Camelot mythmaking. Trump, whatever his many sins, at least shattered the illusion that American culture is a noble, non-partisan enterprise. By placing his name there in the first place, the Center admitted what we all know: culture is political. It always has been. To now remove his name is to pretend otherwise, to play a game of pretend where we scrub the stain while the rot continues.
And what of our British cultural leaders? They are quick to cluck their tongues at American ‘political interference’, but they preside over a nation where the BBC is forever accused of bias, where statues are toppled in the name of ‘decolonisation’, and where the very idea of a national culture is treated as a fascist plot. Their denunciation is not a defence of principle. It is a defence of their own narrow class interests. They wish to be seen as guardians of a transcendent culture, above the grubby fray of politics. But they are not. They are partisans wearing academic gowns.
The truth is that Trump’s removal is a symptom of a deeper sickness. We no longer believe in the possibility of a shared culture. Instead, we see every institution as a battlefield, every name as a weapon to be claimed or defaced. This is what happens when a society loses faith in its own continuity. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that a nation’s culture was a living thing, capable of absorbing and transcending conflict. They could build a monument to Cromwell in Westminster while maintaining a monarchy. We, by contrast, would tear down the lot.
Let us not pretend that Trump is a martyr. He is a vulgarian, a man whose taste runs to gaudy golf courses and gold-plated everything. His presence at the Kennedy Center was always an awkward fit. But the principle stands: if we begin to erase names because we disapprove of the person, where does it stop? Every president has blood on his hands. Kennedy escalated Vietnam. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Washington owned slaves. By the logic of the court order, the Kennedy Center itself should be renamed. But it won’t be, because the name is now sacrosanct. That is the hypocrisy.
The fall of Rome was not caused by a single emperor’s name on a monument. It was caused by a collective loss of civic religion, a failure to believe in the empire’s purpose. We are witnessing the same. Our cultural elites are so busy scrubbing names and denouncing interference that they have forgotten why we build monuments in the first place. They are not just memorials. They are promises that we will remember the whole story, not just the parts we like.
So by all means, remove Trump’s name. But do not pretend it is a victory for culture. It is a surrender to the same tribalism that brought him to power. And as the British cultural leaders clap their hands in approval, they might ask themselves: what name will be removed next, and whose court order will authorise it? In a world where memory is managed by litigation, we are all barbarians now.
