Design Tip for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library
One macabre frame captures the essence of the Trump presidency and the era it unleashed.
To the curator of the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library: put this photo in the front lobby. Make it huge. Tremendously huge.
Supporters will see their win-at-all-costs optimist, whose humanitarian instincts were simply misunderstood. Detractors will recognize in this frame Trump’s savage incompetence and obsession with image above all else.
Students of history will eventually make up most of the visitors to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, and even through a less polarized lens, they will still find much to pore over in this image.
Start with the backdrop: We are in a hospital, where survivors of the massacre at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, which claimed 22 lives, are being treated. A clever advance person thought to erect a “step & repeat”, the well-branded vinyl where celebrities typically pose at big events. Super for selfies, too. The U.S. flag and the presidential standard are shoved to the sides, as are the values they represent.
A tiny infant has been dressed in a tiny bow tie to meet to meet the President of the United States. The baby is flanked by relatives, who appear understandably stunned, and will be tasked with raising the eight-week-old orphan, along with his sisters, ages five and one.
The President of the United States will not be there flashing thumbs-up when the children awake, screaming in the night for their parents. When they start kindergarten, lose a tooth, win the spelling bee or bury a pet, kick the winning goal or clutch in the final seconds, graduate high school or struggle with geometry, walk down the aisle or lose a love — and start families of their own.
As the baby named Paul grows up, he will learn how his young mother and father died shielding him from the shooter. A little miracle, like a child plucked from the rubble of an earthquake. He will hear how they had stopped to buy school supplies for his sister, turning five on that day, and about to start kindergarten, when the shooter, who was out to hunt Mexicans, found baby Paul and his parents, and so many others, in the aisles of Walmart with his semi-automatic rifle.
As he grows older, Paul will learn about the political climate in 2019, the year of his birth and of his parents’ deaths, when bulletproof backpacks became a back-to-school bestseller. He can form his own opinion about the President who warned of immigrant “invasions” and “infestations” and the killer who echoed his language; about the President who called Mexicans “rapists” and compare that to the decency and love he received from the tax-paying, business-owning family of Mexican heritage (U.S. citizens, btw) who stepped up to raise him and his sisters.
He’ll learn about the gun debate that raged, then sputtered, after the bloody weekend that claimed his parents and dozens more in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio; about the dozens of mass shootings that preceded the one he survived, and the dozens that presumably followed.
Paul might have thoughts as he grows up, about the great immigration battles of the Trump presidency, captured in videos of already traumatized children, whose first day of school was marred by the arrests of their parents, poultry plant workers in Mississippi. The parents were undocumented, and the U.S. is above all a Nation of Laws, authorities said at their press conference announcing they’d set a one-day record, with 680 aliens led away in plastic handcuffs.
The raids took place hours after baby orphan was cradled in the First Lady’s arms.
The President suggested after the massacre, but before the raids, that Congress might want to tie gun safety legislation to funding for more border security, if they wanted the President’s signature. Like many tweets of the Trump era, it led to confusion and outrage, but not to meaningful policy.
The killer of Paul’s parents drove from Dallas, not Mexico.
Maybe Paul will walk on some future day through the lobby of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and wonder why the nation Trump led for a time was made safe from poultry workers, while the terror inflicted by white supremacists and gun-wielding mass murderers of every stripe went unanswered.
The country owes Paul answers. He will not find them in the lobby of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.
