Public monuments are the story we tell about ourselves. They shouldn’t aggrandize a living leader.
A plaster statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, can be seen on display on the ground floor of the Kansas Statehouse at Topeka. The 3-foot tall statue was the prototype for a larger bronze intended in the 1890s to top the Capitol dome, but the project was abandoned. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
In a glass case on the ground floor of the Kansas Statehouse is a 3-foot plaster model of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. The model is the work of sculptor J.H. Mahoney, who in 1891 won a design contest to translate the spirit of the state into art.
The model is Mahoney’s vision, in miniature, of a 15-foot tall bronze meant to perch atop the Capitol’s copper dome, then under construction. Held aloft in Cere’s right hand is a torch. By her left side is a shock of wheat. She looks down, as if from her intended elevation of 304 feet, with a gaze both wise and benevolent.
Mahoney, an Indiana artist, dreamed for Kansas in vain.
His Ceres never topped the Capitol dome because the project was soon abandoned by the Legislature. There were objections to the cost of the 4,000-lb bronze and concerns the statue wouldn’t be recognizable from the ground. There was also downright hostility when lawmakers realized Ceres wasn’t just a symbol of agriculture but was also a pagan goddess. Ceres and her Greek counterpart, Demeter, are associated with fertility, marriage, and the underworld.
During a recent visit to the Statehouse, I passed by the glass case that holds the statue of Ceres, a curiosity on display like Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid. I began to ponder the relationship between public buildings and the present moment. Many of our public spaces capture the mood of a time like poetry in stone.
Nothing expresses the horror of war like the massive sphinxes, their wings folded over their eyes, at the 1926 Liberty Memorial at Kansas City. The 1930s federal courthouse in downtown Wichita, with its mix of Art Deco and classical elements, is a testament to the power of government. The Gateway Arch at St. Louis, completed in 1965, is a vertigo-inducing monument to westward expansion.
Other public spaces, many located at the nation’s capital, have through time and memory come to evoke specific reactions in Americans. The Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, has scant mention of slavery in its inscriptions but over the decades has come to be identified with equality and free speech, because of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era.
Other monuments have soured with time.
Statues of dead Confederates, mostly erected as expressions of white supremacy decades after the Civil War ended, began to come down across the country in the wake of protests after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020. That year in Washington, D.C., an 11-foot statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, was toppled and set on fire by Black Lives Matter protestors. The statue was restored in October 2025 by the Trump administration, as part of its effort to return Confederate symbols to public spaces. The campaign is described by executive order as part of restoring “truth and sanity” to American history, but in practice it promotes racist ideology by purging discomfiting facts from the official narrative. It also disenfranchises Black people and other minorities by erasing their history from our public spaces.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape America in his white, privileged image has not been confined to an assault on truth.
He also started tearing stuff down.
On Oct. 20, 2025, without prior notice or oversight, demolition began on the East Wing of the White House. Although Trump had earlier promised the wing would be untouched by construction of a new ballroom, the project had grown in scale. Its size, if completed as Trump envisions, would dwarf the existing White House — and block Pennsylvania Avenue, creating a physical barrier between two of the three branches of government. The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed suit in federal court to stop the project.
In a year that was filled with distressing news, the October 2025 photos of heavy machinery chewing away at the East Wing were a gut punch. The symbolism of Trump tearing down one wing of the White House to create a Versailles-like structure was inescapable. Another line on the way to authoritarianism had been crossed. He was treating the White House — and by extension, the nation — as if it were his own private property.
Our grip on democracy was loosening.
Fast forward five months, and our palms are even sweatier. The guy who knocked down the East Wing has now damaged America’s standing as the leader of the free world by picking an unprovoked war in the Middle East. Now it becomes clear that the White House demolition wasn’t about a ballroom at all, but about what would be hidden beneath.
On March 31, a federal judge granted the National Trust’s request for a preliminary injunction to stop construction of the White House ballroom. Trump, wrote District Judge Richard J. Leon in a 35-page opinion, was a “steward” of the property for future generations of first families, and not the owner. He had to seek Congressional approval before proceeding.
“After all,” Leon wrote, “the White House does not belong to any one man — not even a President!”
The administration had argued that any delay would present a national security risk and expose the White House to damage, but the judge was unswayed.
“While I take seriously the Government’s concerns regarding the safety and security of the White House grounds and the President himself,” Leon wrote, “the existence of a ‘large hole’ beside the White House is, of course, a problem of the President’s own making!”
Leon’s emphatic opinion is likely to be only a temporary setback for Trump’s ballroom. The GOP-controlled Congress, which failed to check him on the Iran war, is unlikely to raise so much as a speed bump for the $400 million project.
While Trump pitched the ballroom as necessary for hosting state dinners, his official reasoning has now changed to one of presidential security. The ballroom, he said, would have a “drone-proof” roof, bulletproof glass, biodefense systems, secure telecommunications, and “major medical facilities.” As reported by the New York Times, Trump referred to a massive underground complex beneath the structure and said the ballroom itself could be considered just a “shed” for what’s under it.
What Trump appears to be building is a bunker, not a ballroom.
The Presidential Emergency Operations Center had been housed beneath the old East Wing. It was originally built for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, was regularly updated, and on Sept. 11 was the secure location used by Vice President Dick Cheney and others. In 2020, Trump took shelter there during the first night of the George Floyd protests.
But what Trump is building now appears to be far more elaborate than the PEOC that was demolished, along with the rest of the East Wing, in October 2025.
The military, Trump said March 28, is “building a massive complex” beneath the ballroom. “It was supposed to be secret,” the president said, “but it became unsecret because of people that are really unpatriotic saying things.”
What Trump seems to be describing is a presidential safe haven for a doomsday scenario. That would have been frightening enough during ordinary times — oh, remember those, Judge Leon! — but factor in an unstable president and an escalating war in the Middle East and it’s a “Dr. Strangelove,” DEFCON ONE freak show.
The buildings Trump can’t tear down now display huge banners of his glowering face. In February, the Justice Department became one of the federal buildings projecting Trump’s face into the public sphere, a chilling sign of the erosion of the traditional separation of the White House and the government’s top prosecutors.
There is apparently no limit to the public territory Trump won’t deface with his brand. Even our money, a kind of pocket monument, is being transformed into propaganda. The longstanding prohibition against putting the face of a living president on our legal tenders is a political Rubicon that Trump has gleefully crossed.
Someday, a future historian (and if we’re lucky it will be a human historian, not something made of silicon chips or an alien species) will look back on our present moment and ponder why we didn’t react with more alarm. All the signs were there. The turning point was when Trump began putting his signature on their money and his face on their gold coins. Flaunting tradition a time or two makes you a maverick. Violating every norm that has kept presidential power in check since the time of George Washington makes one a tyrant.
If civic spaces feel less safe now than they did on Jan. 19, 2025, it’s because they are. The government isn’t supposed to be an agent of disruption. Yet, we have more to fear from the executive branch and its quislings in Congress than at any time in recent memory.
Just as Trump is transforming American democracy into something nearly unrecognizable, he is changing the nature of our public spaces. In Washington, he’s disrupting the dignified geometry of Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. by turning it into a garish political theme park about himself. The ballroom-cum-bunker is just one of the blights. There are others, including a 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery to honor himself. These are not projects undertaken by a leader who has the best interests of American citizens at heart.
Politicians, either from inclination or ignorance, seldom serve the best interests of their constituents. But at least they aren’t dead set on using them as cannon fodder, literally or metaphorically. And a government that moves with deliberate and sometimes hair-pulling slowness is preferable to one in a hurry to knock down norms and walls and fight it out in court later.
That brings me back to the story of the curiosity in the glass case on the ground floor of the Kansas Statehouse.
After the plan to place Ceres atop the Statehouse was abandoned, there wasn’t anything up there save a lightbulb for the better part of 100 years. In 1980, the idea was revived by a committee that agreed something should be put on the dome, and perhaps it should be Ceres, but renamed as the “Spirit of Kansas.” The idea was doomed to fail because the original arguments over the Roman goddess resurfaced. Fred Weaver, a Democratic representative from Baxter Springs, summed it up when he said the people of Kansas would not suffer an “idol” to be placed atop their house of government.
A statue was eventually placed atop the dome, as even a casual student of Kansas history can tell you. It is “Ad Astra,” a 22-foot tall statue of a Kaw warrior with a drawn bow aiming at the North Star, sculpted by Salina artist Richard Bergen and installed in 2002.
In 1984, the Kansas Legislature asked the state arts commission to coordinate a new effort for a Capitol dome sculpture. An initial phase allowed schoolchildren to choose the theme. Later, professional artists were asked to submit designs, and Bergen’s concept was chosen from a group of finalists.
The statue wasn’t a bad choice. The drawn bow makes “Ad Astra” easily recognizable from the ground, and the name is taken from the state motto, “to the stars through difficulty.” Kansas is named after the Kaw nation. The statue is cheerful and even optimistic, if you can forget that we drove the Kaw out of Kansas in 1873.
Placing the finishing touch on the dome took more than a century, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, it took a while. The choice may not have been the best, but it wasn’t the wrong one, either. At least the process was transparent, if maddeningly glacial, and accompanied by robust public debate.
Our civic spaces are the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. History is written not just in books but in bronze and stone, and these monuments are the result of sometimes bitter disagreements about just who we are. The monuments that matter most aren’t about personalities, but ideals.
If Trump had been in charge of the Capitol dome, you know whose statue would be perched there. Like his ballroom, his coin, and his administration, it would stand for nothing.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.