Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” senior political commentator and former Obama adviser David Axelrod said President Donald Trump’s changes to Washington, D.C., were “sad and sort of profane.”
Axelrod said, “He has, besmirched, a national monument. It was created it was designated by Congress as a national monument to a great president, John F Kennedy, who was committed to the arts and actually did, build the thing. The center was created in 1958 by President Eisenhower. It was John F Kennedy who really, put some, umph behind, transforming the place into a great center for the arts.”
He continued, “But it was this was the memorial that was that Congress settled on for him after he was assassinated, like the Lincoln Memorial, like the Washington Monument and so on. So to just sort of casually throw that aside, I don’t think it will stand, over time. But the sad thing is, the president seems to mistake putting your names on buildings, with greatness. Greatness is earned. And John F Kennedy, his name was on that building because of the things that he did as president of the United States. The Lincoln Memorial is there because Abraham Lincoln saved, save the nation, and, and led us through the Civil War. I mean, this is, this it says so much about who the president is and how he thinks, and it’s, it’s sad for him and sad for our country.”
He added, “I worked in the White House for a couple of years. And I may have said this to you before, but I felt a sense of awe every time I worked in that. It walked into that building and there was you. You had a sense of history all around you. I didn’t find the building, deficient in any way. I thought it was majestic in its humility. And it said something about our democracy. And all of Washington was filled with these monuments that had real meaning, and, now, it’s sort of profane, what he’s doing to it.”
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