Rubble Trouble and the Trump Ballroom
Will the gigantic pile of rubble that was once the historic East Wing of the White House come to embody America’s exhaustion with the human battering ram in the Oval Office? As many have pointed out, as a metaphor for the first nine months of Trump’s second term of smash and grab, you couldn’t ask for better.
The White House definitely needed a new ballroom. It always struck me as a bit naff for the world’s biggest superpower to entertain its most important guests in a rented lawn tent, when it wanted to go big. But why does the new Gilded Age glamorama have to be big enough to host a Shriners’ convention? Hard to find much thrilling intimacy with power in a ratfuck for nearly a thousand primped-up political mountaineers. And unlike Trump’s executive orders, the East Wing demolition can’t be reversed by the next incumbent, though a Democratic successor could convert the ballroom into a vestibule for Trump’s nightmares: a seminar space for Ivy League eggheads talking about the climate crisis and the history of slavery.
The demolition images have appalled those who are old-fashioned enough to treasure the idea that the moral grandeur of the White House lies in its understatement, its lack of monarchical exhibitionism, and its modest testament to the working republic. Trump’s gargantuan glom-on to the People’s House is not so much kingly as ersatz imperial. Think Ceaușescu chic or Gaddafi glitz. The British royals, in contrast, are in downsize mode, with no one in the family wanting to actually reside in Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, and the public howling for the ejection of the royal squatter Prince Andrew from the 30-room Royal Lodge. (Trump and the king do share a preference for classical building style. In 1987, dismayed by the sight of glaringly modern architecture on London’s skyline, then-Prince Charles remarked, “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe—when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”) Even Marie Antoinette gets a bum rap for excess. She built her bijou jewel, the Petit Trianon, to get away from the glittering giantism of Versailles Palace.
Loop de Loophole
No one understands the art of the loophole better than the New York real estate developer in the White House. It boggles the mind how soft and squishy all the preservationist guardrails were as Trump, literally and metaphorically, rammed his backhoe into the East Wing. It even amazed Trump himself how easy it was. According to the WSJ, at a dinner two weeks ago with the billionaire donors who contributed to the $300 million cost, Trump marveled that he had been told, “You have zero zoning conditions. You’re the president.” To which he responded, “You got to be kidding.”
Trump would probably have done it anyway. The sound of jackhammers pulverizing zoning laws was the music of his childhood. In a wonderfully resonant piece in The Daily Beast, veteran special correspondent Michael Daly described how Trump’s ferociously venal father, the real estate developer Fred Trump, intent on building seaside apartments, tore down Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park—which landmarkers hadn’t got to in time. Wielding an axe and grinning under his con man’s fedora, Fred instructed the invited crowd to throw bricks at the smiling face on the glass facade of the park’s Pavilion of Fun, then the symbol of Coney Island. His earthmovers rolled in over the glass shards and finished the job.
Like the democratic norms that Trump’s executive orders feed into the shredder, the East Wing disappeared at warp speed. “The president was able to circumvent the strict review process for historic buildings because of a provision in the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966,” we learned in the NYT, “that exempts many federal buildings, including the White House.” Huh? Which fool exempted the White House, the nation’s most iconic building, from any strict review process? I guess the kind of fool who assumed an American president would take the same kind of care President Truman did when he ran his taxpayer-funded 1948 renovation through a six-person bipartisan commission and consulted the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Commission of Fine Arts. The 1966 act clearly never anticipated that a president would act as unilaterally as Trump and risk the conflict of interest involved in tapping unscrutinized private donors to build a casino-sized golden temple to the religion of Big.
With the East Wing in the dumpster, public tours of the White House are indefinitely suspended. In Trump’s second term, his contempt for regular people has becomes exponentially more brazen, starting with that potent image of the billionaire tech uber-race standing shoulder to shoulder behind him on the dais in the Capitol rotunda, while the adoring MAGA proletariat was decanted out of the rain into the Capital One Arena. Does anyone think the first guests in the new dining palace will be the overflow dudes in their Trump 2028 caps? No president has been so disengaged from a government shutdown and its harrowing implication for the 42 million Americans who will be deprived of food stamps this Saturday.
Money Talks…and Talks
But Trump knows how to tap into his populist grievance brand that, so far, has always superseded the transgressions beloved by his base. There isn’t a homeowner alive who doesn’t rant at the absurdity of the noose-like permit requirements and building code hold-ups for the most pettifogging home improvements. Old ladies in Massachusetts write strongly worded letters to local newspapers about waiting two years to get approval for a new skylight. On commercial projects, environmental restrictions are the sadistic love language of state and city bureaucrats more obsessed with protecting the Los Angeles pocket mouse than approving a job-creating mega-warehouse in Moreno Valley, California. A campaign to responsibly rid America of all the process about process would be an excellent bandwagon for Democrats in search of a rallying cry.
As New York real estate doyenne Leona Helmsley once declared, taxes are for the little people. So are real estate regulations. For the one percent, it’s just a question of overweening lawfare to bully local oversight bodies to get your way. Howard Lutnick, the sleek-as-a-seal plutocrat who is now Trump’s Commerce Secretary, filed $56 million in federal and state lawsuits over the course of a decade—and got most of what he wanted—when the village of Southampton tried to block him from building a basketball court and an 11,000-square-foot barn on land designated as agricultural. It wasn’t a good look amongst the new British neighbours of Blackstone chieftain and ballroom donor Stephen Schwarzman when he trucked in water last month, in the middle of a drought, to fill a massive private lake at his new 2,500-acre, $85 million Conholt Park estate in the Cotswolds. The twisting roads of that socially hopping country shire were only just recovering from the invasion of the security detail that came with JD Vance’s summer vacation there.
Before Trump actually builds his gilt-drenched hippodrome, he does have to submit his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, now conveniently headed by Will Sharf, one of his former attorneys. His father Fred wasn’t so smart. After his 1966 Coney Island park demolition, Fred Trump slipped up on ensuring the political fix was in to speed through his seaside apartment towers. He came up against something unexpected: a new reform-minded NYC mayor with a backbone, John Lindsay, who, as the Beast’s Michael Daly tells us, “believed that zoning should mean something.” Fred Trump never got to build those towers.
How apt—and unlikely—it would be if Trump doesn’t get his way this time. And instead of a big beautiful ballroom filled with dancing donors, his presidential legacy is marked by school tours of an Ozymandian pile of rubble that once was the East Wing of the White House.
Join me Wednesday at 11am ET for my video chat with the gifted British journalist and NYT best-selling author Jonathan Freedland, whose new book, The Traitor’s Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany — and the Spy Who Betrayed Them, could not be more topical in its examination of what kind of person risks everything to stand up to tyranny.
What a way with words you have, Tina! I’m still in shock but somehow strangely soothed to know that you share my outrage. And is it any coincidence that the East Wing was used by many First Ladies? (Given the absence of one in this administration most of the time.)
Brilliant word-smithing—-aimed clearly and directly at the Truth. Thank you.