When Shakespeare’s Juliet asked that question, she was contemplating the feud between her family, the Capulets, and their bitter enemies, the Montagues — the family of her lover, Romeo.

Today, the name to be heard and seen everywhere is equally contentious, but hardly associated with nobility: TRUMP. And its standard-bearer, the omnipresent Donald, is seeing to it that it’s plastered everywhere there is a blank space anywhere in the country: on buildings (often along with a Big Brother-sized poster of his face), highway signs, coins (the face again), new paper currency (the Sharpie signature), countless crappy souvenirs — and now even an airport.

As to that last item, after being turned down by New York in his bid to steal John F. Kennedy’s name for a second time, he got Ron DeSantis, the boot-licking governor of Florida, to sign off on renaming Palm Beach International Airport instead.

Normally, places are named for presidents as honorifics after they’re dead. But Trump — possibly beginning to realize that his post-mortem tributes will more closely resemble those of Benito Mussolini than JFK — wants to ensure that he won’t be forgotten too quickly. And besides, he likes looking at images of himself . . . though God alone knows why.

There is, however, one memorial to themselves that sitting presidents plan in advance, though they are not built until after they have left office: their presidential libraries. Since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, our leaders have created repositories for their personal papers and other important memorabilia, leaving a bit of themselves to history. The designs have varied from the modest to the more stately, but have always been in good taste. For example:

President Joe Biden’s library is a work in progress.

And so, apparently, is Donald Trump’s. With nearly three years left to his term, he has already reserved the site and shared this initial rendering with the public:

It is unclear whether Trump will, according to tradition, wait until he is out of office before beginning construction, or jump the gun in an effort to ensure being around to see it to completion in his lifetime.

It is also difficult to imagine anyone having enough possessions of historic interest to fill a phallic symbol of this magnitude.

Perhaps, at long last, we’ll get to see all of the unredacted Epstein files.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/2/26