Sure, Trump Tearing Down White House, But At Least Is Not Black Man With Feet On Resolute Desk
It's about respecting America and We the People's House, and not being Barack Obama.
The People were outraged at the disrespect shown by the president for all boundaries of decency and for the norms of respect for the office he holds. Apparently unaware that the White House isn’t his personal mansion, the low-class slob displayed his utter contempt for the American people — he works for us, goddamn it — by desecrating the beloved People’s house. As one angry American put it in a letter to the New York Post, it was little surprise that the president was “comfortable disrespecting, desecrating and even violating the things Americans cherish.”
Okay, yeah, you already saw the headline, so you know we’re talking about the multiple times wingnuts had a cow over photos of Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office with his dirty born-in-Kenya feet up on the Resolute desk.
Years later, when Kellyanne Conway was mocked for being photographed crouching on a couch in the Oval Office (with her shoes on), Dobbs was apoplectic at the “venom of the left,” shocked that the liberal media would criticize Conway after their “deplorable hypocrisy” in giving Obama s pass for putting his big Black feet on the desk. Little-known fact: JD Vance later fucked that very same couch.
Needless to say, if rightwingers were upset at Obama sitting in the Oval Office with his feet on the desk like many other presidents, including his immediate Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, you can only imagine the reaction if Obama had torn down part of the White House itself!
Imagine the howls if Obama had ordered something like this, especially if it had happened the day after millions of Americans took to the streets to tell him to GTFO:
Yesterday, demolition crews with heavy equipment tore into parts of the East Wing, which was built in 1902 and had a second story added in 1942. The East Wing is traditionally the “base of operations for the first lady,” not that Melania Trump has felt any inclination to show up lately.
The administration knows it’s not a great look, which is why, as the Wall Street Journal reports (gift link), the Treasury Department — which is right next door and has a full view of the demolition — ordered employees not to share photos of the demolition.
“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening in an email to department employees viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
But don’t worry, said a Treasury Department spox — it wasn’t fear of bad publicity, it was simply a prudent measure to avoid any photos from the best possible vantage from revealing “sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details.”
The demolished parts of the East Wing will be replaced by a $250 million, 90,000-square-foot big ugly ballroom, which Trump claims is necessary since the White House currently isn’t spacious enough for the many impressively large balls he desires to hold.
As NPR points out in its very first paragraph, the demolition work went forward “despite lacking approval for construction from the federal agency that oversees such projects.” That would be the National Capital Planning Commission, which is supposed to approve any construction work or major renovations to historic government buildings in the DC area.
Not to worry, though: Over the summer, Trump installed a majority of new members on the commission, and they agree Trump can do anything he wants, as befits a monarch. Commission chair Will Scharf, who also happens to be the White House staff secretary, said when the commission met in September that the body only has authority over “essentially construction, vertical build,” and that it
“does not have jurisdiction. It has long denied that it has jurisdiction over demolition and site preparation work for federal buildings on federal property. . . . Any assertion that this commission should have been consulted earlier than it has been, or than it will be, is simply false and represents a misunderstanding of this commission’s role in that project.”
Scharf did at least say that the commission will of course get involved in the process, just as soon as it gets a plan for the new ballroom from the White House. But according to the people Trump put in place to say he can do anything he wants, he can apparently reduce the East Wing to rubble, either in part or altogether, just as long as he doesn’t then build anything on top of the remains without the commission’s rubber stamp, which it will of course give.
So far, the administration isn’t answering press inquiries about whether the ballroom plan involves tearing down just the section of the facade demolished yesterday, or the entire East Wing. When announcing the new ballroom in July, Trump said there was no need to alter the existing building, so a promise like that practically guaranteed the demolition would go forward. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also vowed the East Wing would be torn down, by insisting to reporters, “Nothing will be torn down.”
Trump has also insisted that the entire cost of the new ballroom will be borne by private donors, which means taxpayers will cover much of it, especially when the cost overruns balloon past the estimated price tag of $250 million.
Trump said at a recent dinner for ballroom donors that the new ballroom won’t be a disgusting eyesore, or at least that it will be “in keeping” with the existing architecture of the White House, and also “appropriate in color and in window shape.”
He also said he’d been told there would be “zero zoning conditions,” which makes sense because that’s what the people he appointed to the planning commission were told to tell him.
“I said, ‘How long will it take me?’” Trump recalled. “‘Sir, you can start tonight, you have no approvals.’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ They said, ‘Sir, this is the White House, you’re the president of the United States, you can do anything you want.’”
It’s officially nobody else’s business, according to White House comms director Steven Chueng, who explained that if you don’t like it, you’re ignorant and stupid and probably a terrorist who hates America too. On Twitter (archive link), Chueng posted a screenshot of a 2015 Smithsonian Magazine article about the extensive renovation work done to the White House under Harry S Truman, and scolded,
Construction has always been a part of the evolution of the White House.
Losers who are quick to criticize need to stop their pearl clutching and understand the building needs to be modernized. Otherwise you’re just living in the past.
Funny, though, Cheung left a couple things out, like the fact that the White House was literally unsafe for occupation at the time. A piano belonging to Truman’s daughter Margaret fell through the floor of what’s now the Private Dining room, and engineers concluded that 150 years of ad hoc renovations, including the construction of an entire third floor, as well as “cutting and drilling for plumbing and wiring,” had so weakened the original building’s wooden beams that the entire structure was in “imminent danger of collapse.”
And Cheung certainly didn’t point out that Truman didn’t just call up a demolition company one day and tell it to gut the interior of the White House. Instead, he asked Congress in 1949 to create a Commission on Renovation of the Executive Mansion, with six members — Truman, the House, and the Senate each appointed two members, which is how things once worked.
Golly, Steven, why didn’t you mention that, LOSER?
In any case, with the White House setting the talking points, all the wingnuts are agreed: Trump’s actions are not those of a tyrant, because presidents improve the White House all the time, stupid libs! Here are a couple of tweets that nicely sum up (archive links both) the rightwing reaction to the power shovels tearing apart the East Wing:
In fact, one Trump sycophant explained (archive link) patiently, that “The whole liberal meltdown over the White House renovation because they don’t know history is another indictment of our education system.”
You see, if only the schools taught young people that everything Donald Trump does is good, we would have a lot less trouble in this great nation. Instead, our children are taught to mock presidents who, like LBJ ordering some new slacks, simply want more ball room.
Again, none of the “Trump can do it because he’s president” posts mention that previous presidents all included Congress, or that the National Capital Planning Commission took four years to approve the huge security fence around the White House, a project initiated by GW Bush and completed under Trump. A few people on social media have pointed out that the White House is on the National Register of Historic Places, which would require that major structural alterations be approved, but there’s a catch: The White House, Supreme Court building, and the Capitol are all exempt from the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.
As the New York Times notes, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House is supposed to ensure the “preservation and the interpretation of the museum character” of the building, but its recommendations are advisory and lack the force of law. Both the American Institute of Architects and the Society of Architectural Historians have called on the White House to do it the right way, with a formal process, not just at whim, but they’re experts, and the Trump administration doesn’t listen to those. Having captured the planning commission, we aren’t sure there are any legal means of stopping this idiocy. That’s what America gets for failing to plan for a narcissistic despot who sees rules only as suggestions, and laws only as loopholes to escape.
So while Barack Obama putting his America-hating shoes up on the Resolute desk defied all norms of presidential decency and norms, defiling OUR WHITE HOUSE NOT HIS, Trump’s demolition of the East Wing is in fact in keeping with American history and tradition, as long as you don’t look at the details. Also in contrast to Obama and his Kenyan traitor toes, nobody’s going to be making up stories about how Trump’s far more appropriate actions this week are actually sending secret Muslim foot messages to tell terrorists he shares their goal of destroying America, the end.
OPEN THREAD.
[NPR / WSJ (gift link) CNN / Smithsonian / Truman Library / NYT / Architectural Record (free registration required)]
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Planned ballroom size fixed, it is 90K square feet, not 9K.
I am actually not allowed near scissors or numbers.
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