What’s next in Donald Trump’s desecration of our fair nation’s capital city? What’s even left after he razed the East Wing of the White House to build Ballroom with Drone Port and dumped the remains of the structure onto the municipal golf course he plans to tear up and replace with some pro-level monstrosity that only rich people will be able to afford?
New York magazine* on Friday published a long look at Trump and Ballroom, which is all the brain-addled chucklefuck thinks or talks about. Like, ever. He talks about it in meetings with his Cabinet. He talks about it in meetings with foreign officials. He talks about it at completely unrelated events. At an event touting his school choice policy a couple of weeks ago, he lectured a lawn full of children about its awesomeness while the kids tried not to die from heatstroke.
But since his opponents talk all the time about tearing down the ballroom the minute he leaves office, he wants us all to know that it would be really hard to destroy. Presumably he thinks that will make everyone less inclined to bother:
“I don’t think they could, physically,” Trump says. “It’s made with the most powerful steel welded together and concrete that is so hard and so strong it’s used in nuclear-power plants. You could take a jackhammer and go to those columns and stand there for two days at full blast and you wouldn’t even see a mark. It’s nuclear concrete. I think it would be very hard. It’s meant for if there’s a nuclear attack. I’m not sure you could take it down.”
Well, that just sounds like a challenge. But we’re betting that if we all pool our money, we can buy more than enough dynamite.
We’re of the opinion that the next president could offer anyone who wants to pay a few dollars the opportunity to come in and take whacks at the building with ballpeen hammers. You’ll have the building down and the national debt paid off in a week.
In fact, the next Democratic presidential nominee should make a show of rolling a crane with a wrecking ball attached down Pennsylvania Avenue a few times a week in 2028, just to make the point.
Alternately, as Jamelle Bouie suggested, we could drone strike Ballroom. Which seems appropriate, though by all accounts, thanks to Trump’s ill-informed war on Iran, the United States military is going to run out of missiles long before his term ends.
New York also quotes a “senior White House official” who says that Trump is rushing to finish the project “because it’s something the Democrats would have a hard time taking away or getting rid of,” adding:
“When the ballroom is built, everyone will always know in perpetuity that it was built by Donald Trump. Are Democrats going to come in and rip it down? I have a hard time believing that.”
Well golly, we had a hard time believing Donald Trump could get elected president. We had an even harder time believing he could get elected to a second term after the chaos of his first one, the million dead of COVID, the insurrection, and all the criminal convictions that attached to him during his four years out of office. The last decade has been one long string of events that we never would have believed would happen. We encourage this senior White House official to think big. Use your imagination. Dream the impossible dream.
It is the same story with President Dumb-Dumb’s Nazi victory arch, which he does not yet have approval to build. Nonetheless, his administration announced on Thursday that it is charging ahead with the excavations needed to build the arch on the chosen site, presumably so America’s screaming baby führer will have the opportunity to give a one-armed salute in its direction during his next State of the Union speech.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the announcement on the site formerly known as Twitter:
God, look at that tacky piece of crap. It looks like a P-51 should be strafing it.
The administration claims that the Supreme Court’s decision last week to let the baby keep building his gilded ballroom gives it all the authority it needs to put crews to work, 20 hours a day and year-round, bringing this monstrosity into existence. So thanks for that, SCOTUS.
The arch is part of Trump’s larger project of building giant monuments to himself all around Washington DC before either his term ends or his Quarter-Pounder-infused arteries finally give up and collapse harder than the East Wing after he ran a bulldozer into it. And he admits he’s doing it because no one else will build monuments to him in the future. Which is true, but we could find plenty of piles of rubble to name after him. The Donald Trump Memorial Rubble Pile sounds like a fine name for the remains of the ballroom sometime in the future.
There are a million good reasons why that ballroom should be torn down at the first opportunity. One big one is that the history and traditions of America do not include our presidents erecting gaudy monuments resembling Versailles to themselves. (Ironically, Trump told New York that the ballroom shares design elements with Versailles but will ultimately be “more beautiful.”) The modesty of the White House is supposed to be a repudiation of that sort of self-aggrandizement. All of Trump’s building projects are a rejection of the small-r republican values of America.
It is not, in our mind, necessarily less important than fixing all the other nightmares that Trump is going to leave behind. Symbols can be just as important. If they weren’t, Trump wouldn’t have embarked on this goddamn building spree in the first place.
It may take a while to knock down Ballroom and Arch and whatever abomination of architecture he builds in place of the Kennedy Center if he follows through on his threat to bulldoze that. But contra David Axelrod or that Pod Save dude who are both quoted in New York, it is going to be necessary.
Oh, and while Ballroom doesn’t have an official name yet, should it be named after Trump? “It should,” he told New York. Yet one more reason to knock it all down.
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A "ballpeen hammer" sounds like a thing any ladyperson in his vicinity should be armed with.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Sell or put out for bid chunks of the rubble as mementoes, like pieces of the Berlin Wall. I bet it would more than pay for the demolition and reconstruction.