By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
In the 1979 slasher film, “When A Stranger Calls,” a babysitter getting threatening phone calls is alerted by the police, “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from within the house.” Well, life is imitating art in Washington, DC, as the White House itself is under attack – in this case, too, the perpetrator is inside the house. President Donald Trump abruptly ordered the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House. Built by enslaved workers during the 1790s on land chosen by George Washington, The White House is owned by the public, not by Trump. It is “The People’s House,” yet, there seems to be no way to prevent Trump from taking a wrecking ball to it.
The demolition provides a perfect metaphor for what Trump is doing to the institutional pillars of our democracy: tearing them down with authoritarian hubris, answering to no one as he erects yet another garish monument to himself.
The demolition will make way for an enormous ballroom, about 90,000 square feet in size – more than one-and-a-half times the size of a football field – that Trump boasts will hold 1,000 people. The architectural rendering depicts a cavernous gold-trimmed room betraying Trump’s obsession with gilt (that’s g-i-l-t), in a style that writer Garrett Graff called “Kremlin-esque.”
In July, after the White House announced plans to build the ballroom, Trump said,
“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will 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. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”
Trump often lies, and this is no exception. Far from being untouched, the East Wing has now been totally demolished. As for his love of the place, Golf Magazine in 2017 was told by a Trump golf partner that Trump said, while golfing, “That White House is a real dump.”
Trump has completely ignored precedent and the legal process for making such dramatic changes to the White House. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a letter to the National Capital Planning Commission, now dominated by Trump appointees, wrote, “we are deeply concerned that the massing and height of the proposed new construction will overwhelm the White House itself—it is 55,000 square feet—and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.” You read that right: the ballroom is far bigger than the White House itself.
Trump has made other changes to the historic building, including paving over the Rose Garden, installed by First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy.
Trump also revealed he plans to build a grand arch, inspired by France’s Arc de Triomphe, on the National Mall for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. When asked by CBS who the arch was for, Trump replied, “Me.” People are now calling it the “Arc de Trump.”
In response to mounting criticism of the East Wing demolition, the White House put out a statement reading in part, “unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom.”
That alleged private funding bears noting. The estimated price tag has grown from $200 million to over $300 million, and will certainly also need significant amounts of staff time and resources from taxpayer-funded agencies like the Secret Service.
This is happening amidst a government shutdown, where thousands of federal workers have been furloughed and fired, and when the draconian impacts of Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” are now hitting millions of Americans, from increasing health insurance premiums to the elimination of SNAP food benefits.
Let’s call this construction, with due sarcasm, Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Build.”
Among the corporations reportedly paying are tech giants Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Palantir; military contractors Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen; cryptocurrency company Coinbase; Comcast, T-Mobile, cigarette maker Altria, and more.
This corporate largesse is clearly offered to curry favor with Trump, who operates in an overtly transactional manner, while seeking unprecedented authoritarian control.
The Republican-controlled Congress has completely abdicated its oversight role, and the federal courts, while slowing Trump’s power grab, are ultimately subordinate to the US Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority, three of whom are Trump appointees, repeatedly empower him with favorable rulings.
Which is why President Trump and his enablers were so openly disturbed by the massive protests that spread across the United States last Saturday, on what was called, “No Kings Day.” Over 7 million people, from Maine to Alaska and Hawaii, in red states as well as blue states, filled the streets to reject Trump’s imperious power grabs. They said, with incredible creativity and in a consistently peaceful and nonviolent way, essentially what the framers of the Constitution wrote, only a few years before enslaved workers laid that cornerstone of the White House: “No kings, no monarchs.”
