With 'Emperor' Donald Trump, there's still no 'there' there

With all of Donald Trump's talk about renaming bodies of water, you may have missed photos of an 8.5-foot-tall statue in the European Parliament headquarters in Strasbourg, France. A gold-leafed, naked Donald Trump sits astride a small, bent man. Trump holds a golf club in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. The "golf ball" at his feet is a small globe, the planet Earth.

Our planet. Our people.

It is very scary. It is very true. The inscription on the base reads: "I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except step down from his back. — The King of Injustice." 

The sculptor, Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, says in art what the rest of the sane world has been thinking all along: The crassness and stupidity of the president of the United States is ruining the world and its people. We are being crushed under his weight. 

The statue is scheduled to move to Antalya, Türkiye, in early November, in advance of the COP31 World Leaders' Summit. There they will talk about climate change, which Mr. Trump contends is a hoax. Even that distracts from the outlook of the current U.S. president and the members of his administration, the large majority of whom claim to be Catholic. Trump is not, but he spent two years at Fordham University. No part of a Jesuit education seems to have entered his mind.

Today, the world looks on in horror as he decides whether to approve the livestreamed execution of a paraplegic federal prisoner, uses government funds to pay for televised propaganda and ruins the landscape of the nation's capital.

Republican President Ronald Reagan restored the federal death penalty shortly before he left office, and the government has executed 16 men since then, in private. Thirteen were executed during the first Trump administration. Then, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 men before leaving office. Three prisoners remained. One may face a firing squad for that execution scheduled for Dec. 3, the feast day of Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier, whose name Trump most certainly heard during his days commuting to college in the Bronx.

The ruckus and disgust over the planned execution and its public airing diverts attention from Trump's other activities. For one, he has been using government funds for TV ads that tout his "successes" and have the look and feel of Nazi propaganda. A judge has ordered them stopped. We'll see.

And then, there is the District of Columbia, the capital city Trump is redesigning to his own liking. He tore down the East Wing of the White House without asking the landmark preservation people and committees. He put his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, after naming himself chair and eliminating most staff and board members who knew anything about the arts. When the courts insisted he remove his name from the center, he closed it. He is withholding renovation funds until he can carve his name into the Carrara marble on the façade. 

To top it off, he plans a triumphal 250-foot arch, an "Arc de Trump," that will block the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The National Park Service estimates the Arc would change the view of 37 historic sites within the district.

And so on, and so on. All the dust obscures the real reasons that poor man in the statue — in reality, all of us — is bent under the weight of the most powerful man in the world: The Ukraine war. The Iranian war. Gas prices. Food prices. ICE abuses of immigrants. The Epstein files.

We need to remember Hans Christian Andersen's tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes." There's still no 'there' there.