What Shall We Call the After-Times?

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As construction workers drilled Trump’s name into the Kennedy Center façade, I found myself thinking about… his limitless ego? His petty childishness? His debasement of the arts? No, as a DIY kind of homeowner, I was wondering what it will take to fill in those holes in the marble someday. I don’t know anything about repairing marble—I assume you can’t just spackle over the holes. Is anyone looking into this?

I’m also a fussy grammarian and a student of history, so it’s not just marble repair that occupies my mind these days. This administration is damaging so much more than just stone, and there will be much to repair someday (you know, like journalism, the environment, history, and our national character). I cling to the hope that repair will be possible, and in preparation I’ve been thinking about the language we’ll use for the historical period that comes after this. I will leave it to others to find words for the years of free fall; I’m pondering what to call the era that will begin when this current nightmare ends. (As it will. I’m sure. Right?)

I started to consider some possibilities. “Return to normalcy” was Warren Harding’s 1920 motto after the Great War, as the American people sought to put that devastation behind them. Of course, Harding led us into one of the worst eras of corruption in the presidency; Teapot Dome was the best known but hardly the only crooked episode of that era. Americans today can take some comfort in knowing we survived an earlier period of presidential criminality, but we don’t need to revisit its launch.

“The Restoration” has a nice ring to it, but that one was taken by the Stuarts when they returned to the throne after bringing back the monarchy in England. I’m sure that seemed like a good idea at the time, after living under Cromwell’s near-dictatorial “republic,” but we want to jettison our current wannabe-monarchy, not enter into a new one.  

So, herewith, a few suggestions to ponder as we wait:

The Great Undoing: The “to undo” list is a long one, starting with any place the Trump name was added. The Kennedy Center should come first since it is the most egregious (well, yet, but it’s only the first year). The histrionic brass plaques installed in the Presidential Walk of Fame should be pretty easy to unscrew, and those won’t even require a ladder—those can be undone by hand while the crane is over at the Institute of Peace.

The Glorious Reversal: Since not all the damage can be undone with tools, maybe we need something more comprehensive? Reversal might better describe the larger act of reversing, not just undoing—as in, reversing the disastrous direction we’ve taken since Inauguration Day. Of course it will be Glorious—since everything Trump has done is defined by a superlative, the reversal will have to be bigly, too.

The Great Rebuilding would apply nicely to the agencies and infrastructures (and literal buildings) demolished under this administration. I’m just not sure it would adequately cover the repair work required to salvage, say, international relationships, or formerly prestigious news networks. 

The Grand Reconstituting might sum it up best. We need to take our fractured Constitution, which is now nearly dissolved in authoritarian acid, and attempt to reconstitute it. Our most basic principles—freedom of the press, protection against search and seizure, and the fundamental definition of what it means to be an American, just for starters—have all been fractured, broken, shattered into nearly unrecognizable pieces. We must remain committed to the goal of reconstituting it.

I’m remembering Gerald Ford telling our nation in 1974 that “our national nightmare is over” as he tried to nudge the nation forward after the Nixon debacle. I quoted that line myself after Trump flew away in a petulant huff in 2021. However right or wrong we judge Ford’s use, mine was premature at best—in fact, our national nightmare had yet to begin.

Our nation is in free fall indeed, and there appears to be no bottom to the current administration’s dangerous, petty, and simultaneously childish and evil approach to dismantling the Constitution. It will take a lot more than spackle to fix it all. When can we schedule the work to begin?