When I watch the bulldozer move through what took three hundred years to build, my first response is physical. Not political. Physical. The kind of nausea that arrives when you watch something irreplaceable disappear and understand with complete clarity that it is not coming back.
I am not writing this to attack you. I am writing this because I think you may not have fully considered what you are standing in the middle of.
The Oval Office is not his. The Smithsonian is not his. The murals on the walls of federal buildings painted by artists who lived through the Depression and rendered that American moment in pigment on plaster — not his. He is a temporary tenant. You are helping him renovate a historic property he does not own and cannot replace.
Ask yourself a simple question. What has he actually built?
Hotels. Golf courses. And a long list of ventures driven into bankruptcy. Contractors unpaid. Partners abandoned. Institutions that trusted him left holding the debt while he moved to the next project.
We are the next project.
But here is what I really want you to consider this morning over your coffee.
It is not only our heritage being dismantled. It is yours. Your children’s. Your grandchildren’s. The America being hollowed out and redecorated as a monument to a man who has never successfully monumentalized anything — that is the America your family lives in too. The portfolio may grow. But you will not be able to spend it in the country that remains when this is finished.
And look to your right. Not politics — direction.
Look at Bondi. Look at what she has become. Look at Patel. Look at Hegseth — a man who had every opportunity to be taken seriously and is now a cautionary footnote. Look at what proximity to this man does to the people who believed they were using him and discovered the arrangement only works one direction.
Do you believe you are different? Do you believe you are smarter than they were? More careful? Better positioned to emerge intact?
History is not waiting to render its verdict. It is writing right now. Your name is going into it in real time. Your grandchildren will search for you and find exactly what you are doing today preserved perfectly and permanently.
No bankruptcy protection covers that.
Here is the thing about three hundred years of American political heritage. It is embarrassingly short by the standards of human civilization. Europe has a thousand years of preserved darkness and beauty both — they kept it not because it was comfortable but because they understood you cannot know where you are going without knowing where you came from. We have a fraction of that. A snap of the fingers. And in that brief moment we built something that the world used as a model even when it disagreed with us.
That is what is being bulldozed.
Not to build something better. To build a monument to a man whose monuments have a consistent history of ending in court.
You are in the room. You still have a choice that most of us don’t have. We can vote, we can write, we can refuse the checkbox that no longer fits — and we will. But you can do something more immediate.
You can slow the bulldozer.
Not for us. For yourself. For the verdict already being written. For the grandchildren who will search your name and find today staring back at them.
Is the portfolio worth that?
I am asking honestly. Not as your enemy. As someone who has been paying attention for a very long time and has watched enough history to know how these particular stories end.
The gold can be removed from the walls. The statesman’s office can be restored. Exhibits can be returned. Murals can be uncovered if they are not first destroyed.
But only if someone in the room decides that their own legacy matters more than their current proximity to his.
