A surreal Neo-confederate blueprint is rewriting America's reality

US President Donald Trump, with US first lady Melania Trump, points a finger before boarding Marine One in Washington, DC, US, September 23, 2026.

Donald Trump — America’s First White President, aspiring dictator for life, El Generalissimo, and Billionaire MAGA God and Prophet — is continuing his campaign to remake Washington, D.C. in his own image.

Trump is digging in, hunkering down, burrowing.

During the Civil War, at their peak, more than 20,000 Union soldiers and other forces were deployed to defend Washington, D.C. from an invasion or attack by the Confederates. The city was surrounded by many miles of fortifications and other defensive positions. It became one of the most heavily defended cities on Earth.

The Confederate traitors never took the city.

On Sunday, Trump announced on his Truth Social propaganda platform that his 250-foot-high arch will serve as a military fortress:

At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle [sic] adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!

Washington, D.C. is already defended by the Pentagon, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

The arch is not the only fortification. As has been widely reported, Trump’s new White House ballroom is a façade for a huge bunker and military complex beneath it. The White House will also be equipped with a drone complex on the roof.

Vietnam veterans and an architectural historian are challenging Trump’s arch in court. Trump is now appealing to “national security” to get past the law.

Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale Law School, told NPR that Trump’s national security justification for the arch is “laughable and pretextual.”

“It’s the lipstick he puts on every pig,” he said. “Immigration is for national security. Terrorists are for national security. Building a border wall is for national security. Building a ballroom is for national security.”

Trump’s real goal is for Washington, D.C. to belong to him, symbolically (and literally), not to the American people.

Like other authoritarians of his ilk, Trump has shown himself to be a megalomaniac who is obsessed with violence, destruction, and gross displays of military power.

But Trump’s behavior reflects something more than just vanity or personalist rule. In 2020, I asked Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist who has closely followed Trump for years, how he made sense of Trump’s aberrant behavior — specifically the response to the COVID pandemic. Based on Trump’s public behavior, and other evidence, Gartner concluded that the president appears to be sadistic:

Yes, the American people are being abused by Donald Trump. This is a key dimension of sadists. I also believe that Donald Trump is democidal.

After Jan. 6 had happened, I asked psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank — author of the landmark book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President — what he made of Trump’s reaction to the attack:

With the attack on the Capitol and the coup attempt Trump is tearing down the foundations of this country, and it really is a source of powerful, deep and incredible pleasure for him. Trump’s followers are the extensions of his sense of self. Instead of his hands, they’re like artificial extensions of his power and they express it.

Years on, these warnings look very restrained.

Trump’s 250-foot-high arch — what a Mother Jones headline called “a killing machine” — exemplifies how, unlike his predecessors, he does not see himself as the president of all Americans or as having any responsibility to the Common Good.

Trump’s primary obligation is to his own corrupt values. As he proudly told The New York Times in January when asked about limits on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

To that end, Trump views the Democrats and all other Americans who do not support him and his MAGA personality cult as an enemy to be punished and brought to heel.

The administration has expanded the national security and surveillance state and built a network of de facto concentration camps to imprison and deport “illegal aliens” (and soon other “undesirables”). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has roughly $75 billion in multiyear funding to act as Trump’s personal shock troops and enforcers for the regime. And under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) and other policies and orders, the Trump administration is now targeting those individuals and groups for their supposedly anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and other “extreme” and “radical” beliefs and values.

In an unprecedented move, Trump has denied or put limits and conditions on federal disaster relief and other funding to Democratic-led states because he considers them disloyal. In essence, Trump is using taxpayer money for political coercion and blackmail.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s followers overran the Capitol in an attempt to nullify the 2020 presidential election to keep him in power — which, if successful, would have ended America’s multiracial and pluralistic democracy. One of his MAGA people carried a Confederate flag. They hurled racial slurs at Black police officers and other law enforcement defending the Capitol and American democracy.

That White supremacist flag of treason never flew over the Capitol during the Civil War. On Jan. 6 it did.

In 1951, William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In 2026, a neo-Confederate and enemy of multiracial democracy is now president of the United States.

The Age of Trump and Trump 2.0 are, in many ways, a story of how the worst parts of America’s past and present are feeding on each other.

What comes out the other side?

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