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Donald Trump’s Tower Envy
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures, from arches to paint jobs to statues, no matter the violation of law or taste.
May 17, 2026
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
His Triumphal Arch
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues. Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol. Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history. Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive, and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the president overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 150 feet, was completed.
Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meager crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route. Recalled one observer, “Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, two thousand guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen's uniforms.” (Peter the Great assembled a parade of little people in 1710, but out of jest and love, not out of inferiority.) Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s. He said, “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”
He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia.
Crowd size envy has its roots in psychological turmoil. Napoleon obviously had the first Napoleon complex. In the search for the source of his many complexes, the doctor who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 secretly removed his penis. The member made its way through various collectors, becoming “like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” but perhaps bigger than Trump’s who, while tall and obese, is “smaller than average… not freakishly small,” but with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”
Painting Over His Inadequacies
Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas over 20 by 30 feet. In 2014 Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation check to pay for a massive portrait of Trump in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.
To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties. Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy. Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool,” the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 430-foot Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the West Wing to build a ballroom.
For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the color and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for Trump at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began. Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 the mortally obese Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside with several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman, but apparently one over 18 years old, as they lounged in the pool. The impotent creature followed by posting a photo of Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the pool filled with feces.
Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia
The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia. His masculine maneuvers do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Center, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.” Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, centers, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centers for the arts.
Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as president, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-story Trump Tower” becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 70-foot tall aluminum “Kartlis Deda” (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue located on Sololaki Hill. Then there’s the Trump Tower Down Under, a $1 billion development at 91 floors, to rise with other real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the “Gaza Riviera,” if the president can get Jared Kushner and the Israelis to remove all Palestinians.
Tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes. The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers,” activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read. Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,” but no Botox or orange dyes. Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1,400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs. In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.
If You Paint it, They Will Come
Trump loves gloss paints and gold accoutrements to distract attention from his infirm, swollen, and discolored appendages; for them he uses concealer and support socks. He ordered covering the blemishes of the 130-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House with white paint. White paint white may help make the building appear larger, but still not as large as Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, with more than 1,100 rooms and a nuclear bunker underneath. (Three thousand workers died during its construction.) Perhaps in response to Ceausescu’s grandiosity, Trump insists on erecting an ever-growing ballroom, now at $1 billion and with a nuclear bunker of its own.
But an authoritarian paint job will destroy the Eisenhower Building’s exterior of granite (quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, in America, not like most Trump products that are manufactured abroad). Paint adheres poorly to granite, reveals its imperfections, leads immediately to peeling, chipping, staining, and requires forever high maintenance—which is why no one paints granite kitchen counters. But tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Everything He Touches Turns to Gold
If not his own Lenin-like mausoleum, which was constructed with polished, but not painted granite, there will be a Miami-based excrescence, the Trump Presidential Library, perhaps with a mock-up bathroom to display the secret documents he stole from the White House—modeled on the bathroom he used at Mar-o-Lago to hold them. Also to be interred are the 747 jet that the Qataris gave him in return for favors. An auditorium featuring an already completed 22-foot gold statue of Trump will crown the spectacle. As one of his potent progeny, Eric, wrote, “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team… This landmark… will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” Sculptor Alan Cottrel manufactured the recently-unveiled statue, but was misled about its purposes and meanings, and he gently called it a “cluster f--k.” Contrell was instructed by the statue’s crypo investors “to alter Trump’s appearance… making him thinner and removing his ‘turkey neck,’” which may be a euphemism for some other appendage.
Whatever the size of the gold president, Trump’s Christian nationalist handlers have forgotten the fact that the 22-foot gold erection recalls the biblical story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the punishment to those who embraced idolatry. Even more, the golden Trump will not rise above the largest bronze statues in the world, the 65-feet tall effigies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. One hopes that Trump does not set his eyes upon the 555-feet tall Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone (marble) obelisk. We have heard that Trump wants to paint it orange.
If you have any doubt, remember after 9/11 Trump instinctively ejaculated on that day that one of his buildings had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
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Trump Lashes Out After Judge Blocks Construction of His White House Ballroom
"Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!" wrote US District Judge Richard Leon.
Mar 31, 2026
President Donald Trump was left fuming after a federal judge blocked construction of his planned White House ballroom.
In a ruling delivered Tuesday, US District Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction requested by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, which had sued to stop the ballroom from being built.
While handing down the injunction, Leon reminded Trump that "the president of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations," then emphasized "he is not, however, the owner" of the building.
The judge—appointed by former President George W. Bush—found that Trump's ballroom was the first time that a proposed major addition to the White House went forward without any kind of congressional approval, and he recommended that the president seek input from the legislative branch before moving forward with the project.
"Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!" Leon wrote in his conclusion. "But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project."
The judge granted a two-week delay for his order to go into effect, but he warned any above-ground construction of the ballroom done in that time will be "at risk of being taken down depending on the outcome of this case."
In a Truth Social post delivered after the ruling, the president angrily lashed out at National Trust for Historic Preservation, which he described as "a Radical Left Group of Lunatics."
The president also claimed that his ballroom and the renovated John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which Trump shut down less than two months after illegally slapping his own name on the side of the building—"will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World."
Trump last year tore down the entire East Wing of the White House in preparation for the ballroom's construction, which was set to begin this week.
The cost of the ballroom is estimated at $400 million, and Trump is financing it by soliciting donations from some of America’s wealthiest corporations—including several with government contracts and interests in deregulation—such as Apple, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir.
The president held an exclusive White House dinner for some of the largest donors to the ballroom in October, in a move that many critics decried as a “cash-for-access” event.
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Right-Wing Catholic Off Trump Religion Panel After Israel-Gaza Remarks at Antisemitism Event
"I will not be bullied," said Carrie Prejean Boller. "I have the religious freedom to refuse support for a government that is bombing civilians and starving families in Gaza, and that does not make me an antisemite."
Feb 11, 2026
A conservative Catholic was expelled from President Donald Trump's so-called Religious Liberty Commission this week over remarks at a hearing on antisemitism in which she pushed back against those who conflate criticism of Israel and its genocidal war on Gaza with hatred of Jewish people.
Religious Liberty Commission Chair Dan Patrick, who is also Texas' Republican lieutenant governor, announced Wednesday that Carrie Prejean Boller had been ousted from the panel, writing on X that "no member... has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue."
"This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America," he claimed. "This was my decision."
Patrick added that Trump "respects all faiths"—even though at least 13 of the commission's remaining 15 members are Christian, only one is Jewish, and none are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or other religions to which millions of Americans adhere. A coalition of faith groups this week filed a federal lawsuit over what one critic described as the commission's rejection of "our nation’s religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative ‘Judeo-Christian’ beliefs."
Noting that Israeli forces have killed "tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza," Prejean Boller asked panel participant and University of California Los Angeles law student Yitzchok Frankel, who is Jewish, "In a country built on religious liberty and the First Amendment, do you believe someone can stand firmly against antisemitism... and at the same time, condemn the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, or reject political Zionism, or not support the political state of Israel?"
"Or do you believe that speaking out about what many Americans view as genocide in Gaza should be treated as antisemitic?" added Prejean Boller, who also took aim at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which has been widely condemned for conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.
Frankel replied "yes" to the assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitic.
Prejean Boller also came under fire for wearing pins of US and Palestinian flags during Monday's hearing.
"I wore an American flag pin next to a Palestinian flag as a moral statement of solidarity with civilians who are being bombed, displaced, and deliberately starved in Gaza," Prejean Boller said Tuesday on X in response to calls for her resignation from the commission.
"I did this after watching many participants ignore, minimize, or outright deny what is plainly visible: a campaign of mass killing and starvation of a trapped population," she continued. "Silence in the face of that is not religious liberty, it is moral complicity. My Christian faith calls on me to stand for those who are suffering [and] in need."
"Forcing people to affirm Zionism as a condition of participation is not only wrong, it is directly contrary to religious freedom, especially on a body created to protect conscience," Prejean Boller stressed. "As a Catholic, I have both a constitutional right and a God-given freedom of religion and conscience not to endorse a political ideology or a government that is carrying out mass civilian killing and starvation."
Zionism is the movement for a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine—their ancestral birthplace—under the belief that God gave them the land. It has also been criticized as a settler-colonial and racist ideology, as in order to secure a Jewish homeland, Zionists have engaged in ethnic cleansing, occupation, invasions, and genocide against Palestinian Arabs.
Prejean Boller was Miss California in 2009 and Miss USA runner-up that same year. She launched her career as a Christian activist during the latter pageant after she answered a question about same-sex marriage by saying she opposed it. Then-businessman Trump owned most of Miss USA at the time and publicly supported Prejean Boller, saying "it wasn't a bad answer."
Since then, Prejean Boller has been known for her anti-LGBTQ+ statements and for paying parents and children for going without masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) commended Prejean Boller Wednesday "for using her position to oppose conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and encourage solidarity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews," calling her "one of a growing number of Americans, including political conservatives, who recognize that corrupted politicians have been trying to silence and smear Americans critical of the Israeli government under the guise of countering antisemitism."
"We also condemn Texas Lt. Gov. Patrick’s baseless and predictable decision to remove her from the commission for refusing to conflate antisemitism with criticism of the Israel apartheid government," CAIR added.
In her statement Tuesday, Prejean Boller said, "I will not be bullied."
"I have the religious freedom to refuse support for a government that is bombing civilians and starving families in Gaza, and that does not make me an antisemite," she insisted. "It makes me a pro-life Catholic and a free American who will not surrender religious liberty to political pressure."
"Zionist supremacy has no place on an American religious liberty commission," Prejean Boller added.
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