There was no shortage of bad news to cover in 2025. But I want to end the year by looking to the future and focusing on something more joyous: detrumpification. I spent most of this year—indeed, most of this last decade—thinking about one man. Now, for just a moment, I want to think about what comes after him.
One day, likely by January 20, 2029, Donald Trump will no longer be the president of the United States. The Constitution will bar him from seeking a third term, no matter what nonsense Alan Dershowitz plans to soon publish. It is highly probable that Trump will be replaced by a new Democratic president. America’s economic, social, and moral decline in just the last 11 months makes it unlikely that his successor will win the most votes in 2028.
That new president, whoever they happen to be, will face countless choices about how to rebuild after Trump’s second term. Some things simply can’t be undone. The United States will likely never recover the full trust of our allies in Europe and Asia, who now know that another Trump is always at most four years away. Confidence in the rule of law in this country will remain shaken for generations, as will our reputation as a home for immigrants and a citadel of democratic and constitutional government.
Other damage will be repairable, but only with time and effort. Federal agencies will need to rehire thousands of civil servants to replace those purged by figures like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. Institutional knowledge at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more will need to be replenished. Funding for academic and scientific research will need to resume. There will be thousands of green-card applications to approve and hundreds of citizenship ceremonies to hold. Criminal investigations will need to be opened, and antitrust litigation must begin again.
For now I want to focus on the less impactful but highly symbolic aspects of detrumpification. It will not be enough to simply reverse Trump’s policies or unwind his executive orders when a new Democratic president takes office. The next administration must commit itself in addition to purging the aesthetic rot of Trump’s second term from our national life. Detrumpification must be celebrated as an act of victory and an exercise in joy.
Take, for example, Trump’s campaign against the Kennedy Center. Congress created the cultural center in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and designated it by law as a “living memorial” for John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. The famed stages and theaters along the Potomac have hosted some of the greatest artists from the United States and from around the world.
Trump has spent most of 2025 desecrating the place. First he purged most of the board that governs the institution. Then he replaced its members with pliable ideologues and sycophantic cronies, capped off by installing himself as the new chairman. In recent months, Trump has been personally overseeing its cultural work. This week, his underlings sought to capstone their cultural vandalism by renaming the center itself.
“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Twitter this week. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.”
Even the North Korean regime might blanche at this narcissism. Far from “saving” the institution, Trump’s takeover has destroyed the Kennedy Center’s finances and its reputation through boycotts and purges, with ticket sales near pandemic-level lows. The attempted renaming is manifestly illegal since Congress named it after Kennedy by law. With its usual regard for the rule of law, the Trump administration paid no heed. After a half-century of reading “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” the building’s marble edifice now also bears “The Donald J. Trump and” on top of it, as well. (In typical slapdash fashion, the second “the” remains on the facade.)
When those letters come down during the next president’s term, it should not be done in the middle of the night or without any warning.
It is unclear how much of this vandalism comes at Trump’s direction and how much of it comes from subordinates looking to please him. At the beginning of this month, for example, the State Department said that it had renamed the United States Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At first, the department slapped some cheap steel letters on the front entrance of the building without any warning. By the end of the day, however, the State Department’s Twitter account formally announced the change “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”
Even the clumsiest and least subtle political cartoonist could not outdo this one. Trump is a weak dealmaker at best: His attempts to bully America’s top trading partners into signing new trade agreements this year have largely failed, and the Supreme Court appears ready to strip him of his favored cudgel. His negotiations on Capitol Hill have gone no further than passing one omnibus budget this summer, after which he abandoned the lawmaking process altogether. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Trump bragged in October.
It also goes without saying that the renaming choice is oxymoronic. At Trump’s behest, the U.S. military is currently killing people in small boats throughout the Caribbean and the western Pacific by claiming that they are drug smugglers or, in even more alarmist terms, “narco-terrorists.” Instead of apprehending them and trying them in court, Trump is summarily executing them. The president has also ordered a naval blockade of Venezuela, hoping to topple the regime of Nicolás Maduro, and may yet resort to full-scale military force to dislodge him. Congress has granted no legal authorization for any of this.
Tearing down these nameplates will be as much about telling the truth as anything else. Other tasks will be more complicated. So far, Trump’s most egregious act was the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing. It came without any public notice or consultation, without any permission from Congress, and without approval from key historical and architectural boards. The president simply hired some construction equipment and began tearing down public property.
Trump hopes to replace it with a massive ballroom for entertaining foreign dignitaries and domestic supporters. I will not bother listing its projected costs, seating capacity, or square footage because it will probably increase again by the time you finish reading this article. The president has continuously revised his plans for the ballroom, each time with increasing grandiosity, and he recently fired the original architect he had hired, at least in part over creative and structural differences.
The corrupt and self-serving project is an ongoing scar on one of the most important public sites in America. And yet part of me still hopes that Trump completes the project before the end of his second term. I can imagine no greater visual for the next Democratic president’s first 100 days than demolishing whatever decadent monstrosity he builds. The ballroom’s proposed architectural flaws will likely necessitate this either way, but the next president should make a real show of it.
What could be done with the site? One would almost be tempted to cordon off the area surrounding the ballroom, hire a demolition crew to pack it with big bundles of dynamite, and wire it up to one of those old-fashioned plungers that Wile E. Coyote uses when he tries to blow up the Road Runner. Perhaps the final push could be synchronized with fireworks on the Fourth of July, or at the stroke of midnight for some other historic anniversary.
Given the historic structures near the site, a less explosive—but still spectacular—option might be safer, though. Either way, there must be an element of public participation in the ballroom’s destruction. When Trump tore down the East Wing, his henchmen concealed the rubble from public view, as if they knew on some fundamental level that it was wrong. The next president should make the ballroom’s fate a cause for public celebration. Families should be there to watch it happen. Music should be played for the crowds. Networks should broadcast it live. Americans should celebrate its demise.
From there, the East Wing should be rebuilt exactly as it was before, as if Trump had never existed. His other “renovations” to the White House should meet a similar fate. White House officials should film themselves taking down the cheap, tacky display of presidential portraits outside the West Wing and the disparaging plaques beneath them. The next administration should make a documentary about tearing out the Mar-a-Lago-style patio that he paved over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden to install.
Other indignities will lie ahead over the next three years. The U.S. Mint is reportedly planning to issue a dollar coin featuring Trump’s portrait despite the long-standing precedent against using living people on U.S. currency. There have been proposals among Trump’s loyalists in Congress to place him on the $100 or $250 bill, to rename airports after him, to make his birthday a federal holiday, and to carve his likeness into Mount Rushmore.
Detrumpification should go far beyond this, of course. Joe Biden, the previous post-Trump president, tried to balance public calls for unity and reconciliation with prosecutors’ efforts to hold Trump and his allies accountable for their crimes. The next Democratic president might not have that option. Ideally they would prosecute him again for any triable crimes he has committed and pressure the Supreme Court to overturn its disastrous immunity ruling. Trump will also probably take steps to immunize his allies and associates through liberal use of the pardon power, complicating matters further.
For now, it is enough to say that the end of Trump’s presidency must be palpably different from previous changes in administrations. Detrumpification must have a visual and physical record. It must be an event and a celebration. It must be an enduring memory and a warning to anyone who hopes to venerate authoritarian figures on American soil in the future. It must represent not just a political defeat but a societal rejection of Trumpism itself.
What Trump and his allies are doing, after all, is not really about honoring him. These tributes are meant to carry the same message as an unrepaired hole in the wall left by a violent domestic abuser’s fist. The goal is to humiliate and to intimidate anyone who didn’t support him, to imply violence without leaving bruises, and to create a perpetual sense of unease, despair, and dread. To visibly erase his image and his name from American public life would not be a distraction from moving forward but rather a prerequisite for it.
