Byron York is the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a dependable defender of the Trump administration. (Although, allegedly, he resents being reminded of it.) But he sounded alarmed and even a bit angry yesterday in commenting on the biggest news in Washington—the unexpected demolition of an entire wing of the presidential mansion.
“The president needs to tell the public now what he is doing with the East Wing of the White House,” York tweeted sternly. “And then tell the public why he didn’t tell them before he started doing it.” Trump-friendly voices don’t typically demand accountability from the emperor, let alone demand it “now.” Lord knows, they haven’t made much fuss about his efforts to figuratively bulldoze the government.
Seeing him literally bulldoze it appears to have hit a nerve, though. Who could have guessed that a president who treats every civic norm as a dare, who seems bent on knocking over every pillar of the constitutional order to gratify his own sense of grandeur, might extend his demolition project to actual edifices?
Not York, apparently. Enjoy the ride, buddy.
Today we’re going to talk about the world’s most obvious metaphor. Or second-most obvious, if you’re a fan of The Onion.
Bait and switch.
The world’s most obvious metaphor begins as all Trump initiatives do, with the president lying and his fans playing dumb about it.
Right-wingers who would have doused themselves in gasoline and lit a match if Barack Obama had so much as joked about razing part of the White House responded indignantly to York on Twitter, insisting that Trump did tell the public of his plans for the East Wing. But that’s not true. When the president announced in late July that he’d be adding a ballroom to that side of the campus, he stressed that construction wouldn’t require knocking down parts of the standing structure.
“It won’t interfere with the current building,” he told reporters. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite.” The price tag, he added, would be around $200 million and would be covered by private donations.
Like Darth Vader, he has now altered the deal. Without a word of notice to Americans, the entire East Wing is being torn down to make way for the ballroom and the price tag has ballooned to $300 million. There are all sorts of commissions and panels and regulations related to historic preservation that should have been consulted before work began, but needless to say, the president declined. He did what he wanted to do because he knew no one would stop him.
It’s a classic lawless Trump bait-and-switch, just like how he promised voters cheaper groceries and tighter borders last fall and then treated his reelection as a mandate for full-metal autocracy. Chumps like me tried to warn American voters that postliberalism is a plan to demolish the American experiment, not improve it, but they either didn’t believe it or didn’t care. Now here we are.
The fact that he knocked over part of the White House to make way for a ballroom, of all things, is also comically on the nose.
Apart from building a dedicated presidential TV complex with dozens of screens for him to watch simultaneously, it’s the Trumpiest thing he could have done. Ballrooms are grandiose and ornate, associated in the collective imagination with palaces and manors; go figure that a guy with blatant regal pretensions would move to reflect that impulse architecturally. They’re also spaces for entertaining visitors, particularly high-society courtiers who’ve come to flatter the lord of the house. Trump runs the government as a patronage system in which his friends benefit while his enemies suffer, so of course he fancies having a place where well-heeled “friends” can congregate.
A ballroom is a ridiculous thing for a populist lionized by rural America to prioritize, especially in the middle of a shutdown ostensibly being fought over middle-class health-care subsidies, but that too is Trumpism all over. Our common-man president has turned the Oval Office into a gaudy gilded nightmare and will doubtless do the same to his new dance hall, reflecting the ludicrous degree to which he and his family have enriched themselves from the presidency. The “private donations” he’s using to fund the construction are transparently a conduit for special interests to buy influence with him, just another shakedown in a government that’s made them S.O.P. (One wonders where the extra $100 million in the latest cost estimate is really going.) MAGA, a movement ostensibly founded on draining the Washington swamp, is the most egregious good-government fraud in American history and a gilded ballroom will be a monument to it.
“Lots of presidents have made additions to the White House!” Trump’s apologists will exclaim at this point, and they will be correct in doing so. But the ballroom isn’t any ol’ addition: It’s an incongruous European barnacle on a complex that, while stately, is more humble than most of its continental counterparts, befitting America’s democratic republican roots. Trumpism, similarly, is a Euro-nationalist politics of “blood and soil” authoritarianism that attached itself incongruously to Enlightenment liberalism and is now aiming to demolish it. Like the ballroom, it’s not truly an “addition.” It’s a replacement.
As usual, architecturally as well as ideologically, making America great again seems to require making America less American than it used to be.
Even the president’s lip service about how much he admires the current (remaining) White House structure reminds me of his occasional disingenuous nods to America’s civic traditions. “I’m not a king,” he insisted a few days ago even as his cronies crowed to reporters about turning Congress into a Duma-esque rubber stamp. “I always abide by the courts,” he assured Americans earlier this year before his lawyers began repeatedly not abiding by the courts.
Demolishing the East Wing while babbling about respect for the White House resembles the transition point we’ve reached between democracy and autocracy, from first-world to third-world government. The country as we’ve known it is still sort of there but increasingly not; the landmarks remain recognizable yet are being obscured by rubble. If you want to know which system the president is loyal to, chew on this: At 90,000 square feet, the new “Trump ballroom” will be nearly twice the size of the White House mansion. It will dwarf everything around it, dominating the campus.
It will be a lasting mark on the psychology of the presidency, courtesy of the most authoritarian leader this country has ever had. I expect Americans will love it.
Resignation.
There’s one more way in which the world’s most obvious metaphor reflects the political moment. To all appearances, the president’s base is the only faction that’s excited about what he’s doing—annnnnd yet, even so, pretty much everyone agrees that nothing will be done to stop him. Americans seem as passive and fatalistic about the demolition as they are mortified by it.
To be sure, outfits like the National Trust for Historic Preservation are sending concerned letters demanding that the administration consult with other outfits like the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts. But no one expects oversight of any sort, certainly not from the Republican quislings in Congress and probably not from our sclerotic courts, which will likely descend into the usual interminable parade of procedural motions and appeals while the public loses interest. At best, some judge might manage to halt construction of the new ballroom, leaving the wreckage of the East Wing to sit in place for months or years.
“It feels like another failure of the American system that someone can destroy an entire wing of the White House without notice,” journalist Garrett Graff complained. It is a failure of the American system, but it’s one we’ve all come to expect after just nine months of this catastrophe. The public has given up on our institutions’ ability to stop Trump; bulldozing the presidential complex is a physical demonstration of that demoralizing reality.
Should we just roll with it, then?
“Maybe I’m wrong and the East Wing demolition will be the thing that finally brings down Trump, but the freakout seems like a repeat of the mistakes the Resistance made in the first Trump administration,” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle warned. “Freaking out about small, relatively innocuous things muddies your message about larger, actually important things, because it makes you look like you are just reflexively anti-Trump no matter what.”
Hard to argue with that. We should, in fact, reserve our outrage for things that are truly bad, not things that are metaphors for things that are truly bad. The wrinkle is that Americans seem to also not care about those “larger, actually important things” that are truly bad.
For instance: The president is very obviously getting his ducks in a row to try to overturn another election. “We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,” he told reporters on Tuesday, noting that FBI director Kash Patel and intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard are, ahem, “working on” the problem. He wasn’t blowing smoke either: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the administration just hired one of the lawyers who worked on Trump’s “stop the steal” effort to investigate the 2020 election and other “voting-related issues.”
Trump’s new point person for election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security, Heather Honey, is a “rigged election” truther too, of course. Here’s a fun detail about her from the New York Times:
On a call with right-wing activists in March, before her appointment to the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Honey suggested that the new administration could declare a “national emergency” and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments. She said this could be based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote.
“And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said in March, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times from someone who joined the call, “and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”
That was published in the most influential newspaper in America. The Journal is probably the second-most influential. And Trump made his comments about never letting 2020 happen again on camera, in public view. These are not obscure outlets and this is not a trivial concern: Successfully blocking victorious Democrats from power in 2026 or 2028, as Trump attempted to do once before, would be a secession-level crisis.
The ballroom itself is circumstantial evidence that Trump is not planning to leave when his term expires. You don’t really think a narcissist like him is going to all this trouble so that President Gavin Newsom has a nice spot to entertain visiting dignitaries, do you?
If you’ve seen evidence that normie Americans are more concerned about the next Trump coup—or anything else he’s been doing—than they are about the East Wing being bulldozed, produce it. Maybe, in a post-literate society, it’s too much to ask voters to react more strongly to things they’ve read, or should be reading, than to arresting photos of the White House in ruins. Or maybe Trump voters are so far down a rabbit hole of propaganda nowadays that only visuals can penetrate the unreality bubble. Worrying about another MAGA coup can and will be dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” until the moment it happens, but pictures of the East Wing reduced to rubble? Those don’t lie.
The fact that people like Byron York seem more perturbed by one than the other should lead us to rethink our priors about what will and will not arouse the MAGA-friendly conscience.
The ballroom is forever.
Wherever you land on Trump’s latest real-estate development project, let’s please agree on one thing. The ballroom isn’t going anywhere once he leaves office.
If it makes you feel better to fantasize about tearing it down on day one of the next Democratic presidency, go nuts. But here again, architecture is a metaphor for politics: The powers accrued by a postliberal autocrat won’t be completely disgorged by the other party when (if?) it returns to power. President Newsom won’t maintain ICE as his secret police force, granted, but unilateral tariff powers? Shaking down ideological opponents for wrongthink? Siccing the Justice Department on political enemies? Out-and-out bribe-taking in the form of “cryptocurrency” or what have you?
It’s all on the table for the next Democratic president. He and his party’s members in Congress could, theoretically, renounce the many corruptions of the imperial presidency and work to pass legislation dismantling it, but they also could have done that in 2021 and didn’t. Every transgression is a precedent, and ambitious Democrats won’t want to part with some of the precedents Trump has set.
So, no, the ballroom won’t be dismantled. At least, I hope it won’t: For Americans to get excited about destroying a physical symbol of Trumpism, his term would have to end up so dark and dystopian as to generate a bipartisan groundswell of statue-toppling revolutionary fervor to repudiate his legacy. Otherwise, I can’t imagine the public—or Trump’s successor—wanting to spend time, energy, and money on bringing in bulldozers just to humiliate him. The next Democratic president will have other fish to fry.
Far more likely is that liberals will use the ballroom in ways that embarrass the man who built it. I can imagine a soiree hosted there by the next Democratic administration in which everyone who was vindictively prosecuted by Trump congregates at ground zero of his pretensions to royal grandeur to celebrate his downfall. Picture James Comey clinking glasses with Letitia James at news that the former president has just been indicted on 800 counts related to corruption.
That’s as much satisfaction as liberals will get from the ballroom, though. The White House complex, like America, will never again be what it was. Make peace with it or leave.
