Why Trump wants towers with his name on them |
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of ‘Cold War Warriors’ to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets.
President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings.
Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities?
The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle and his unfinished great Mexican wall.
He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980 and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors.
Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow.
Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the US$30 billion (US$42 billion) Sochi Olympics and a US$1.4 billion ($2 billion) golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues.
Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet (76 metres) taller than the........