When Trump Decides What To Leave Behind — 1/5/26

The US's attack on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolas Maduro this weekend provided a vivid reminder to Donald Trump’s opponents that a president’s impact continues long after he has left office.

 When a president completes his term, his successor usually spends much time and effort attempting to reverse the departing chief executive’s major accomplishments. Because Trump has relied so heavily on enacting policy through executive orders rather than legislation, Democrats console themselves with the knowledge that it will be much easier for the next president to repeal those orders than to move new bills through Congress undoing laws that Trump had signed.

But as Republicans still consumed with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act more than 15 years after its passage can attest, erasing a president’s work is easier said than done. The Trump tax cuts from 2017 survived four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, and it's unlikely that any Democrat save the most progressive would reopen the border to Biden-era levels. (It’s even more improbable that the next president will restore Maduro to power. But it’s likely that the next president will adopt a very different approach to Venezuela and Latin America.)

That’s the way Washington has always worked: political and policy movements shift back and forth, but fundamental institutions remain in place regardless of which party holds the majority. Until now. 

In his last interview of 2025, Trump announced that construction would soon begin on the neoclassical structure to which he refers as “the Triumphal Arch,” adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery at the west end of the National Mall directly across from the Lincoln Memorial. Early designs of the arch, which would be designed to honor American history and military service, resemble the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Critics are already referring to the “Arc de Trump.”

Trump has previously indicated that he wants the project completed in time for the nation’s 250th birthday this July, a breakneck pace for erecting such a memorial and circumventing the recognized process for its approval. This comes at a time when a similar controversy has erupted over Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House and replace it with a much larger state ballroom. The two projects together would fundamentally change the face of the nation’s capital city, but they would also present Trump’s successor with a wrenching set of decisions.

Trump is a developer. He spent his entire professional career constructing buildings and putting his name on them. He understands that tangible representations of a legacy are much more durable. Long after he has left office, even if many of his policy goals have been wiped away or forgotten, he sees physical structure as a more lasting way of ensuring that he is remembered. 

Whether those memories are positive or negative, or some combination, is of little concern. In his 1980s book The Art of the Deal, Trump famously said, “Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.” While Trump would certainly prefer to be thought of in a positive light by future generations, the worst possible outcome would be to become a 21st-century Ozymandias, forgotten in the sands of time.

An arch and a ballroom are certainly not foolproof protections against such an outcome. But they will both be physical representations of Trump’s time in office that few other presidents can match. The challenge for the next Democrat who occupies the Oval Office is whether to remove these edifices or simply to rename them. Taking Trump’s name off of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is an afternoon’s work. But the new ballroom, whether formally named after Trump or not, will always be associated with him, and removing it from the White House grounds altogether will seem unnecessarily vengeful and logistically problematic. Eliminating or moving a memorial arch from the city’s front door is an easier construction project, but the symbolism of such an action from a new president emphasizing national unity would be equally complicated. 

Dozens of potential Democratic presidential candidates have already begun to step forward in advance of the 2028 election, and it may be difficult for the casual observer to ascertain the political and policy distinctions between them. But all will frame their campaign messages with exceedingly harsh denunciations of Trump. Perhaps we might ask them how they intend to confront both the physical and geopolitical reminders that he leaves behind.