What history built, Donald Trump destroys

If you made a list of the worst things the seditionist Donald Trump has done as president, reducing the East Wing of the White House to rubble would probably not make it to the top fifty. That is not to say it isn't a stupid, odious, self-serving and lawless move; it only speaks to how many of his other worst acts have involved killing people outright, or killing them through negligence, or undoing so many of the Constitution's edicts and harming so very many people for fun that he appears to be treating the grievances listed out in the Declaration of Independence as his own personal checklist.

Compared to all of those, the gleeful destruction of the White House itself stands apart in that he and his traitorous aides haven't killed anyone in the process. Yet, at least. That we know of.

The other thing that sets this particular act of corruption apart, however, is the sheer pettiness of it. The very, very personal nature of the insult. For most of the worst offenses the Trump administration has put its mind to, the vast majority have nothing to do with Trump himself. Shredding every safety net has been a Republican mantra for generations now; killing a few million people by withdrawing worldwide food aid, destroying one of the most consequential tools of soft power the nation had ever built, was barely an afterthought as an assembled army of Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, and fascist techbros rampaged through the government on a quest to break any and every part of it not devoted exclusively to serving elite interests. The international crime of bombing unidentified civilian boats on the loose dictatorial assertion that the crews were probably criminals; that one is from the administration's psychopaths, Stephen Miller foremost. The notion that Republican presidents do not have to follow laws is an assertion with decades of grotesque maneuvering behind it, all orchestrated to produce a Supreme Court corrupt enough to go along with the destruction.

Every illegal, amoral, and glibly corrupt action by the second "Trump administration" is the result of a conspiracy of, at minimum, hundreds; none of it could have been executed without rooms of scurrying minions plotting it out and a congress's worth of enablers sabotaging each failsafe so that the looting could continue unimpeded, and a large chunk of it appears to have been done without ever informing Trump himself of it, if his public statements can be believed. All of it merits the word treasonous, because it requires all involved to ignore their sworn oaths, instead taking concrete actions to support that which the Constitution plainly forbids.

The bulldozing of a third of the White House, though; that appears to be a personal Trump obsession. While everything else in the administration may point to an invested group of viziers coaching the stupid old man into supporting longtime far-right fantasies, bulldozing the East Wing to build a Trump-desired pleasure dome in his own image is very Donald Trump, probably the most Donald Trump thing he has yet done. And it is terrifying for reasons entirely opposite to all those other things; it appears there is no conspiracy, no team of viziers with plans of their own.

No, it appears Donald Trump pointed a single fat, stubby finger at the White House, ordered a third of it bulldozed to the ground, and it just happened. Nobody stopped him. Nobody stomped off in a fit, refusing to be part of such an absurd act of destruction. Nobody reminded him that the White House is not his personal resort, and while he is allowed to do a great deal in the way of temporary modifications he is not allowed to unilaterally destroy that which he does not own.

Or, apparently, he is. And I don't know what that speaks to, because it doesn't quite count as corruption and doesn't have the same openly murderous intent of the fascist right's own obsessions. It is mostly what a mildly drunk historian might call Mad King Shit—one of those countless bizarre moments in history in which a known-incompetent but still-protected ruler orders his servants to do something stupid, dangerous, and ridiculous, and they all do it.

At this point we have to imagine that Trump could order his Secret Service agents to set fire to the Oval Office drapes, and they'd not only do it, they'd soak the place in gasoline first. He wanted to bulldoze the East Wing to build what appears, from his models, to be an off-strip Vegas conference room stapled to the presidential residence. And so he ordered it done, and just like that, it happened.

The East Wing itself was constructed in 1902 and substantially renovated forty years later. Of considerably more historic significance was the East Colonnade, the corridor between the East Wing and main building. It was designed and built by Thomas Jefferson in 1805, and the reason for its demolition appears to be expediency. Trump wanted to do it before anyone caught wind that he was trying to.

Reporting remains ambiguous about how much of the now-crushed interiors were able to be salvaged; the art and furniture were reportedly removed, but the East Wing was home to intricate paneling, marble floors, and other fixtures of historic significance. Of special note would have been the remaining Jefferson-era materials, which would have been prized by restorers and other bidders due to that history.

Video footage of the demolition, however, suggests that no effort was made to deconstruct those historically significant features. It was all brought down with heavy machinery.

If you're wondering what happened to the resulting rubble, the answer appears to be: Trump took it. More precisely, Trump appears to have taken the dirt being excavated from the site to use as fill on the nearby East Potomac Golf Course, a public course that Trump has also expressed interest in meddling with.

Whether that fill also contains portions of slave-made bricks and other crushed historic detritus remains to be seen. There's also been no ready answers so far as to whether anyone bothered to check the East Wing for asbestos or other common toxins before tearing it out with heavy machinery.

The reason we know nothing about the preparations for the demolition is because the Trump White House hid them. The public "plan" was, according to Trump and his team, that the existing White House structure wouldn't be impacted by the new "ballroom" annex. That's what they said, and we learned that was a lie only when the demolition began.

That part, at least, was consistent with the rest of what his minions produce. Knowing that the demolition of the East Wing would create public outrage, they hid the plan from the public until the last moment, hid it from the preservationist groups and federal agencies that would usually be consulted for such dramatic renovations, gave government preservation workers the bare minimum notice to move what they could from the building and destroyed all of the rest.

We also see how hurried the demolition process was from Trump's displayed renderings of what will replace it: an oversized, convention-style "ballroom" that will dwarf the White House itself. The design process is unfinished, to put it mildly: Even the most recent of the ever-changing models show only an architecturally generic shell, one with impossible windows and stairs leading nowhere.

The priority appears to be to get the whole "$300 million" structure built before Trump either leaves office or shuffles off his mortal coil, whichever comes first. So, like the Qatari sky palace "gifted" to Trump to ostensibly serve as his Air Force One, the details of how any of this is to work out will be handled ... later, apparently.

You might think that "should a sitting president bulldoze large portions of public property with no public review, based solely on his own whim" is one of the few things that would break through the partisan divide, in the nation's discourse. That assumption fails, however, to consider that our discourse is managed almost entirely by insufferable gobshites, people who were hired specifically for the absence of any internal moral compass and subsequent ability to switch between core beliefs situationally, on a dime, for the sole purpose of elevating partisanship above such things as facts and morals.

So the gobshite version is what we've got. It can be easily recognized; if a professional take-haver transparently switches their opinion of circumstances based solely on whether a perceived ally or enemy is the instigator, that person is a gobshite.

If you want an example of the form but don't want to spend much effort hunting one down, you can usually just turn your field binoculars towards Ross Douthat, who has never mustered up anything more than lazy gobshittery through an entire paper-humiliating, nation-embarrassing career. Douthat's version is instructive, at least if you are planning a new career as a cheap whore: day in, day out, his columns never do any more than the bare minimum required to get the client to leave.

In that gobshite version, then, this is all the fault of liberalism, and it is now common wisdom that the White House should be dwarfed in scale by a convention hall plopped inside its supposedly secure perimeters, and if a post-presidency Barack Obama can build a presidential library that Ross does not personally find attractive in a completely different city and state then it stands to reason Donald Trump can destroy the White House without consultation and rebuild whatever-the-f--k there because reasons.

Gobshittery is so incredibly boring. I'm sure Douthat fell asleep at least twice, trying to pad his version out and tack on a both-sidesy conclusion. And it is all the more boring because if Barack Obama tore down the East Wing without input or a clear plan in mind Douthat would have very publicly lost his mind and declared it a sin against America, and you know it and I know it and Ross knows it from the bottom of his pathetic hackish empty soul.

For other gobshite versions you can turn to Bloomberg News, which neutrally explains that by destroying the East Wing without seeking the input of federal agencies involved in these things, Trump is doing a Business Thing that you wouldn't understand, one that "forces the issue." True enough. Or you can go to the haunted remains of the Washington Post, which published an anonymous editorial that consists of a slurry of halfhearted whataboutism molded into something resembling a shrug.

Since engaging with the Douthat version would require taking a long shower afterwards, we can instead take some anti-inspiration from the Post's sillier attempt. Here is the nut of it.

The teardown of the White House’s East Wing this week is a Rorschach test. Many see the rubble as a metaphor for President Donald Trump’s reckless disregard of norms and the rule of law, a reflection of his willingness to bulldoze history and a temple to a second Gilded Age, paid for by corporate donors. Others see what they love about Trump: A lifelong builder boldly pursuing a grand vision, a change agent unafraid to decisively take on the status quo and a developer slashing through red tape that would stymie any normal politician.

In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible. Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties.

It's still at least somewhat somewhat surprising that a convicted fraudster, violence-prodding instigator of a coup against the government, brazenly corrupt and cartoonishly ignorant imbecile can flatten an entire wing of the White House on his own whim and still have it passed off as "reasonable" but "jarring," with words like "boldly" and "unafraid" and "decisively" slathered on top just as they are whenever Trump and Miller order the extrajudicial bombing of unidentified boats in international waters or when he boldly if deludedly insists that the city of Portland, Oregon is in flames.

We should start out by noting that the Washington Post premised their whole goddamn column on a brazen lie. There are a great many possible plans that could have alleviated the need of state visitors to be seen inside a tent. Even if we were to all agree among ourselves that the White House was in desperate need of tentless entertaining, there have been an abundance of plans that never involved razing the entire eastern portion of the White House to the ground.

Trump's original plan, in fact, promised the White House structure would remain unscathed. That's how he sold it. That's what his allies used to justify sidelining federal agencies and procedures typically used even for far more modest changes: No, no, this would be only an addition to the White House, just plopping down a much-needed ballroom for holding presidential balls in a tent-free, toilet-rich fashion.

So we can add another gobshite marker on our maps: The public was presented with a plan that would add this new architectural boil, but one that would not destroy what already exists. Now that the destruction has happened, it's being sold by defenders as inherent to the plan all along—that the only public choice to be made here was between destroying the East Wing and Colonnade or forcing national and international dignitaries to congregate in tents and shit into buckets.

Do you want that, critics? Do you want international dignitaries to be forced to shit into buckets?

First off, those are not the only two possible solutions. And second off: Yes. Yes, actually, given what we have seen from the international elite of late, I do think world luminaries should be forced to shit into buckets on the White House lawn. It would do the American psyche a world of good to see Prince Andrew reduced to shitting into a bucket, and many of us would feel a great sense of accomplishment if we were able to maneuver that outcome into existence.

Or, if that is too much for the elites to bear, a smaller building could be constructed. Or it could be built somewhere else.

There have been reasons why such "renovations" have not taken place before, and not all of them revolve around a compulsive need to preserve brickwork laid by slaves or the office Eleanor Roosevelt used to transform the First Ladyship. It is not, it has never been, a simple decision. The overlapping uses of the White House as seat of the executive branch, as secure installation to protect the commander in chief, and as tourist trap slash convention center has always been a tangled mess, and there is not, in fact, universal agreement that what the compound needs is an enormous non-securable brick regularly stuffed with whichever world busybodies can score a ticket.

There are reasonable arguments for putting such large-scale events somewhere else, in fact, somewhere near enough the White House to be an easy trip but one not as likely to be littered with espionage devices after every posh event. (A previous modern president, coincidentally the only one as crooked and self-serving as the current one, even went so far as to advertise his own self-branded hotel as such a destination. And then he ratcheted up the price of drinks.)

There is also, as the scolds confess, the optics to be considered. The White House is somewhat pompously referred to as "the people's house," though nobody truly means it. But it was designed from the outset not to be a palace of the glittering, oppressive monarchial sort. The founding generation based their whole violent rebellion on the premise that Kings were Bad, and that the badness was inherent to the position, and while there were squabbles about just how imperial the new president ought to be allowed to be, the settled on answer was at least not that.

The whole premise of the White House, however, was that it was a rental space. The nation owns it; the president is allowed to bed there because it is expedient. It is not his. It is intentionally modest, an architectural triviality compared to the Capitol building.

Turning the White House from that intentional modesty into a larger, more ostentatious, more palatial compound is not a decision that should be based on one man's insatiable self-absorption. Every piece attempting an ad-hoc rationalization of the act bases itself on a moaning complaint that it is oh so difficult to come to a consensus about what to build or how to build it, as if that weren't the entire fucking point to begin with—that anything half as dramatic as turning a third of the White House into a Mar-a-Lago-styled, botox-injected pomp palace ought to be subject to more scrutiny than none.

Of course it is a difficult decision. If you don't think it should be a difficult, lengthy process, that says something about you.

I don't consider the surprise demolition of the White House East Wing to be a "Rorschach test," as the anonymous Designated Groveler of the Post would have it. It is not an unknowable conundrum, some tangled thing that might be a butterfly or might be a sex predator but who's to say. Trump demolished a historic public building on his own whim, asserted a right to build whatever he wants on the rubble, and invited the rest of the country and the whole of government to pound sand if they objected.

You can argue that it is good or bad, but it is not ambiguous. And, in fact, it is perfectly in keeping with the fascist ideals of New Republicanism, the same ideals that see government accounts producing openly white nationalist agitprop and that has sent Congress scurrying to their bunkers rather than confronting the plain illegality of some of Trump's acts—like imposing new tariffs—and the nation-sabotaging batshit incompetence of others.

In a democracy, we might expect that if it was determined the nation needed a new D.C. playground for the elite classes, we would ring up the long-established agencies tasked with sorting out such things, and produce designs, and debate the merits, and come to some conclusion.

Or there is the Trumpian approach: National reformation through personal edict, discarding the nation's institutions and norms so that his personal will may be enacted most expeditiously, leaving hacks around the nation scrambling to announce why each new decision is Good, Actually, so long as you ignore all the parts that aren't.

Does nobody, among these apologists, think the smell of all of this is odd? The People's House being demolished and rebuilt according to the whims of a single man; it will be financed by dozens of favor-seeking oligarchs and their corporate holdings; the American people and their elected government are, explicitly, barred from having a say in any of it.

That doesn't seem a little too on the nose, to anyone? The circumvention of public policy norms in favor of a single ruler's whims, a government in which "the people" get no say and one in which the fabulously rich and well-connected organize to dismantle the offices they don't care for in order to build a more comfortable space that will cater instead to their own desires? No?

We don't even need to get into the optics of building a dedicated pleasure dome for hosting the ruling classes; it is self explanatory. For my part: I much would rather the whole lot of them be forced to shit into buckets, when coming to ask for favors in the people's house, but I am not in charge of these things.

Unfortunately.