29 July—Today would be Benito Mussolini’s 142^nd birthday had he not been unceremoniously albeit understandably and justifiably offed by Italian antifascist partisans on 28 April 1945. We can be sure that Donald Trump won’t observe Il Duce’s birth. At least in public.

One of the edifices named after Mussolini during his fascist regime is a sports complex in Rome now known as Foro Italico (Italian Forum). It was built between 1928 and 1938 and originally called Foro Mussolini (Mussolini’s Forum). That’s what’s done in monarchies and dictatorships.

Many a German and Austrian city, for instance, had an Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Adolf-Hitler-Straße, Adolf-Hitler-Allee, and/or other geographical and monumental recognition of Der Führer—for reasons that included but were not limited to Teutonic Arschküssen (ass kissing). You’d be hard-pressed to find anything with Hitler’s name on it today, and most families with that surname have even changed it.

(That doesn’t justify the disgraceful and unacceptable modern American practice of “history correcting itself” by changing the names of whatever they may be because the namesakes are no longer regarded as politically correct.)

Joe Stalin also had lots of places and things renamed in his honor while he was ruling the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. They all were renamed again in the great Soviet de-Stalinization of 1961.

(Hitler may be unique among tyrants in having a bug named in his honor. Anophthalmus hitleri is a species of blind cave beetle found only in several humid caves in Slovenia. The blind beetle is predatory, so the adults and larvae are presumed to chow down on smaller cave inhabitants. It was named after and dedicated to Hitler in 1933, shortly after he became chancellor of Germany, by an Austrian admirer.)

Ass-kissing and a predatory bug naturally take us to Donald Trump. And, as it happens, Melania is from Slovenia. So a week ago Mike Simpson, a Trumpublican congressman from Idaho who chairs the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, excreted an amendment to whatever bill it may have been to rename the Kennedy Center Opera House, as it’s been called since it was opened in 1971, to the Melania Trump Opera House.

Why? Because, as A.K. Simpson gushes, “First Lady Melania Trump serves as the Honorary Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Kennedy Center. [Why would that be? Good question, since neither she nor her husband ever even visited the Kennedy Center during his first term polluting the White House and still would have nothing to do with it had he not usurped control this term.] Naming a theater after her is an excellent way to recognize her appreciation for the arts.” So A.K. Simpson is “proud to honor her support and commitment in promoting the arts and humanities.”

Well, Melania has supported and contributed to the arts at least by posing for some pretty good pictures.

But A.K. Simpson’s kiss planted on either or both of Trump buttocks is nothing compared to fellow Trumpublican Bob Onder’s tongue up the fat man’s crack—probably so far up that it’s coming out of Trump’s mouth. A.K. Onder, an inconsequential first-term congressman from Missouri, wants to strip John Kennedy’s name from the center and instead have it known as the Trump Center for the Performing Arts.

Playing on Trump’s stolen 2016 campaign slogan, A.K. Onder calls his vomitous bill the Make Entertainment Great Again Act—MEGA. He jokingly refers to Trump as “a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape.” And he “cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump.”

Do we really want suck-ups like that running the country?