Melania probably doesn’t care. As The New York Times’ Katie Rogers reported in her book about first ladies, American Woman, Melania only dropped by the East Wing, which held the offices for the first lady and her staff, a couple of times in the first term. She hasn’t been around much this term, either.
Treasury Department employees, who work opposite the razing, were warned not to share pictures of it. There must be a sense that it’s profane, as it was in 1980 when Trump smashed Bonwit Teller’s limestone friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to build Trump Tower. The friezes had little artistic merit, said a “vice president” of the Trump company, identified as “John Baron” – a fake name Trump used, he acknowledged while testifying in a lawsuit over his use of hundreds of illegal Polish immigrants for the demolition.
But Trump has so little respect for this 123-year-old symbol of American history that he didn’t check with federal planning officials or Congress before he obliterated one side of the White House. As if he’s tearing down a petrol station.
When I visited the White House with my mum as a kid, we loved overhearing foreign tourists ooh and ah about how relatively small and modest the house was. Its simplicity was part of its charm. We didn’t have the grand castles of the European nobility. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.
Trump does not do small or modest. He does big, flashy odes to self. The joke when Trump was first running was that he’d slap his name on the White House facade as he did with all his other properties. And now it’s happening. White House officials are saying Trump will name the ballroom after himself.
It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.
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Build a huge, $US300 million gilt ballroom – which will overshadow the central edifice – while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval Office; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said on Thursday. “We’re going to kill them.”
Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain – things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high.
“We the People” is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.
Trump stopped trade talks with Canada on Friday because he did not like an ad commissioned by the province of Ontario that quoted from a radio address former president Ronald Reagan made that criticised tariffs.
Trump, who posts fake AI slop, called the ad “FAKE”. (Reagan’s quotes were accurate but were in a different order.) The Canadians paused it.
It was like when Trump levied a 50 per cent unilateral tariff on Brazil because it had the temerity to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro, who also tried to steal an election when he was president. Or when Trump mused about bailing out his right-wing ally in Argentina, potentially to the tune of $US40 billion, and promised to quadruple the amount of Argentine beef allowed into this country at a lower tariff rate – infuriating struggling American ranchers.
Trump can indulge any crazy impulse, and nobody can check him.
“The Congress is adrift,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told the Times’ Carl Hulse, on overseeing Trump’s legally questionable military moves and vindictive tariffs. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”
Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.
We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate – and not the fun Halloween kind.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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