Republicans scrub Trump's name from campaign sites as he commissions marble monuments across Washington

…(cont) The problem surfaced first in Florida. On September 22nd, Byron Donalds, running for governor, relaunched his campaign website. The old banner had read, "Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds." The new layout removed several of those mentions — not all of them, the record is careful to note, but several, the way a name gets quietly trimmed rather than announced as cut. The following day, in Tennessee's reddest of seats, Charlie Hatcher — who had unseated a sitting congressman by running as the "Pro-Trump" candidate — filed a new slogan of his own. The word "Pro-Trump" did not survive the filing.

Preceded in death, then, by "chip in," "endorsed," and "pro-," in that order, each falling within the same twelve days a building campaign was announced in their place — plaster going up as the ink came down.

Survived, generously, by the statues. Marble does not run for reelection and cannot scrub its own name off a plinth. Somewhere between Augustus and a former Tennessee agriculture commissioner, that became the whole difference: a man building himself into permanence in stone at the exact hour his own candidates are treating his name like a receipt they'd rather not have to explain to the customer.

This was never about affection. It was branding, and like most branding stripped for parts, what's underneath is mostly shit — penny-ante website copy, quietly swapped, while the marble gets ordered in bulk.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners send their November ballots — filled out, and not on his behalf.