Damnatio Memoriae: On Remembering Trump, Damn His Name

Finger find the button marked erase,
like a deep sea diver falling into a mermaid’s embrace.

The Trumpists seem fond of the Roman Empire, or at least ts aesthetics and symbology.

Well.

The Romans had a way to deal with public figures who wrecked society in pursuit of personal glorification. Today, we use the modern latin phrase “Damnatio memoriae” to describe it.

To the Romans, this involved attempting the complete erasure of the condemned person from history, with any monuments destroyed and their names erased from any manuscripts including official records.

The Romans never actually succeeded in completely erasing anyone like this, as far as we can tell anyway. But they tried several times.

But it’s a fitting response to Trump, damn his name.

Of course, this is the United States; we don’t do things like passing laws that forbid even speaking the damned person’s name. And erasing factual information from historical records is just wrong.

But we can, and should, formally erase all remnants of his self-aggrandizement from any public resources. Portraits, sculptures, buildings, anything he stuck his name on.

The TrumpRX.com web site, for example. Ugh.

All of it: destroyed.

Including whatever abomination he’s building over the wreckage of a significant portion of the White House.

NBC news has the current list of people and corporations which have contributed to fund this monument to insecure masculinity:

Altria Group
Amazon
Apple
Booz Allen Hamilton
Caterpillar
Coinbase
Comcast
Hard Rock International
Google
HP
Lockheed Martin
Meta
Micron Technology
Microsoft
NextEra Energy
Palantir Technologies
Ripple
Reynolds American
T-Mobile
Tether
Union Pacific Railroad
J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
Adelson Family Foundation
Stefan E. Brodie
Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
Edward and Shari Glazer
Harold Hamm
Benjamin Leon Jr.
The Lutnick Family
The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Konstantin Sokolov
Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
Paolo Tiramani
Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler Winklevoss

All of us are paying for this, really, but these people and corporations are doing so directly and personally rather than just by having our taxes misappropriated

Damn all of their memories too.

And we should amend the Constitution to forbid the State from memorializing or naming anything after any living person and for some period after the person has died; maybe with a time limit of something like 25 or 50 years.

After that, whatever.