Critic looks forward to the coming 'detrumpification'

New Republic staff writer Matt Ford says he looks forward to the upcoming days of “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,” Ford said. “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…. 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.”

Ford said the next Democratic administration will likely commit itself 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.”

Trump has spent most of 2025 desecrating the [Kennedy Center]. First, he purged most of the board that governs the institution and then replaced its members with “pliable ideologues and sycophantic cronies.” Then he installed a new chairman. He’s also been personally overseeing its cultural work. But this week, his underlings sought to capstone their cultural vandalism by renaming the center itself.”

Now, after a half-century of the words “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” adorning the building’s marble edifice it now includes the words “The Donald J. Trump and” slapped on top “in typical slapdash fashion,” says Ford, with the second “the” remaining on the original 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,” said Ford. “ … Tearing down these nameplates will be as much about telling the truth as anything else.”

Other tasks, said Ford, will be more complicated. Trump’s demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing without any public notice or consultation will be more difficult. The president simply hired some construction equipment and began tearing down public property with plans to build a ballroom.

“I can imagine no greater visual for the next Democratic president’s first 100 days than demolishing whatever decadent monstrosity [Trump] builds,” said Ford. “The ballroom’s proposed architectural flaws will likely necessitate this either way, but the next president should make a real show of it. … [W]ire 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.”

Other indignities will lie ahead over the next three years, warns Ford, but detrumpification should go far beyond this.

“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,” said Ford. “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.”