In Ruins
Strap in. This is going to be good. Bad, but good.
The public feels, two to one, that Donald Trump’s unassisted destruction of the East Wing of the White House in order to build a huge, gilded ballroom to be named for himself, was bad: arrogant, garish, vulgar and enabled only through an audacious lie. Most in the media courageous enough to take this on, agreed.
“Summarily smashing part of the White House without telling people threatens the fundamental idea of the republic.” —The Atlantic
Even some rock-ribbed Republican politicians were appalled — ex-politicians, actually, ones who no longer have to be obsequious to the boss. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, Tea Party darling and one of Barack Obama’s most virulent critics, called the planned ballroom “an utter desecration to the people’s house,” adding: “If I ran for President in 2028, I’d run on taking a bulldozer to it. In fact, I’d invite the American people one weekend to bring their own sledgehammers & crowbars to help tear that abomination down.”
Experts saw the whole thing as ghastly. The Architect’s Newspaper, voice of American architecture, called it “spray-tan authoritarianism … a perfect metaphor for what Trump is doing to the United States.”
The most eloquent repudiation was this, from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:
“The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.”
He continued:
“The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it.”
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Okay, enough negativity! Hell, will no one bravely come to Mr. Trump’s defense?
Aha! Yes. We have it right here. We’re snapping it open right now! The Washington Post editorial board thinks the whole idea is just swell.
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Sigh, welcome to the latest edition of …
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So, below I am going to reprint the entire text of the Wapo editorial published on Saturday, and I am going to annotate and denounce it in italics where appropriate, which is often. In fact, right from the get-go. Right from the revolting headline.
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— No. The people objecting are not remotely NIMBYs, however you tweeze the term. NIMBY is a derogatory acronym about hypocrites, ones who might grudgingly accept the need for less-than-elegant social programs benefitting social goals — but selfishly demanding that it be nowhere near them. Whether you agree with Trump’s White House vision or not, the critics here are protesting what they see as an insult to the soul of the country, ostentation replicating monarchy. Obviously the objections here have nothing to do with physical proximity. It is heartfelt and selfless and noble in spirit. Whether or not you find it specious.
This NIMBY calumny is flagrantly repeated twice more, including at the very end of the editorial, compounding its damage. More on this later.
On to the body of the editorial:
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“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.”
— Okay, so far! Sure, it is that tedious “he said, she said” stuff, which is mealy-mouthed, don’t-take-a-stand journalism, offering noncommittal pseudo-balance pablum. But The Post is hardly alone in that in this, the Spineless Season for the mainstream media.
Uh-oh. Hold on a bit. They’re about to ruin it, in the very next sentence of the editorial:
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible.”
— Here we have the gist of the piece, laid out with admirable lack of equivocation. It’s a “reasonable idea,” they say. No, it isn’t. It’s a grotesque idea. The Post executive honchos who wrote this opinion or ordered others to write it should get out of their boardroom and start talking to actual people — say, their own reporters and editors.
But they own the place and, by fiduciary entitlement, are allowed to infect on others their views, however leprous. That’s not the big deal here. The big deal is that what is about to spill out in nauseatingly self-revealing detail over the remainder of the editorial represents a bald-faced betrayal of readers. You will not be expressly told this, but Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who, with sharp elbows flying, is directing the paper’s opinions, is a major corporate contributor to the demolition project and the subsequent construction of a voluptuous gelt-gilded imperial ballroom. His Amazon is listed as one of the benefactors. This entire editorial opinion in The Post is not — cannot possibly be — objective and unbiased. The reader needs to know this, but isn’t told it. We’ll get back to this point later. It gets even more odious. Continuing with the editorial:
“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. The State Dining Room seats 140. The East Room seats about 200. Trump says the ballroom at the center of his 90,000-square-foot addition will accommodate 999 guests. The next Democratic president will be happy to have this.
“Preservationists express horror that Trump did not submit his plans to their scrutiny, but the truth is that this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand paper cuts.
— No kidding. Welcome to the maddening but liberatingly transparent bureaucracy of democracy. The simple, jaw-dropping assumption here is that Trump is a potentate who needs to follow no rules that we commoners must face. This is where the true heinous nature of this editorial becomes clear: It is written by or at the behest of business executives who have long considered themselves beleaguered by the tedium of public oversight, with petty paper pushers hindering their plans.
Also, it is not even subtly mentioned that Trump did this by fiat and by surprise, secretly, until it was a fait accompli, after assuring the public this was not going to affect the current White House structure at all. A blatant lie, whitewashed by editorial silence.
Moving on, this comes next:
Follow Trump’s second term
— We’re not shitting you! This was the ad embedded at this point in this editorial. It invited people to click on a link to get a feed of Trump-related stories in The Post.
We continue with the editorial:
“Fortunately for Trump, the White House is exempt from some of the required regulations that other federal buildings must comply with. Because it has become far too difficult to build anything in America.”
— Yes! The business moguls continue to bleat out their grievances at how the mere peon civil servants are treating them.
“Prominent Democrats have become vocal this year in calling out their party’s lawyerly obsession with process, which combined with a not in my backyard (NIMBY) mentality, has prevented a place such as California from building a high-speed rail project that its voters approved by referendum in 2008.”
— Again with the NIMBY. Doubling down on the name-calling bullshit. Continuing:
“Many homeowners have become red-pilled by their struggles to navigate the slow-as-molasses maze of government bureaucracy when they’re trying to make even modest renovations, such as adding a deck. D.C. alone has 70 historic districts and other random entities that can throw sand in the gears.
— They actually have the gall to compare Trump’s tribulations to those of Homer and Oona Homeowners. We continue:
“Though the fundraising for the ballroom creates problematic conflicts of interest…”
— Wait. What? Nope, too late to admit the humiliating truth. The Post blithely, dishonestly moves on without elaboration:
“… two examples validate Trump’s aggressive approach. After a fence jumper got inside the White House in 2014, it was obvious that better perimeter fencing needed to be installed. But doing so involved five public meetings of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) over two years, as members took pains to ensure the fencing complied with environmental rules. Construction didn’t begin until July 2019.
“Or consider the modest Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial near the National Air and Space Museum. Congress authorized its creation in 1999. Architect Frank Gehry was selected in 2009. The NCPC rejected Gehry’s initial design proposal in 2014 before approving a revised plan the next year. The Commission of Fine Arts gave its approval in 2017. The memorial wasn’t opened until late 2020. By contrast, Eisenhower planned and executed D-Day in about six months.”
— I, personally, would argue that speed was more essential in 1944 than in 2009. But what do I — or you — know? We are peons, not captains of industry.
“The president has said the project will cost $300 million but that he’s raised $350 million from private donors. The White House released a list of 37 donors on Thursday, including Apple, Amazon, Comcast and Lockheed Martin. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
— Whoa. The biggie in deception. A trove of tergiversation. First, the notion that this is the gift of “private donors” is naive at best and an outright lie at worst. These “donations” are bribes by rich people for continuing or future favors by Trump. We all will pay dearly in the next three years for government decisions benefitting their companies at our expense.
Aaaand … the previous paragraph was added waaay too far down in the story, with waaay too much explanation lacking. It never adequately emphasized the Amazon-Bezos connection. But most significantly, the paragraph was not included in the original editorial!
I am going to add four more screamers to the end of what I just wrote, above.
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It was apparently added after other online critics pointed out the dishonesty of the first version. Continuing:
“Trump joins a long list of presidents who have left their imprint on the White House. Theodore Roosevelt replaced greenhouses to construct the West Wing. William Howard Taft constructed the first Oval Office in 1909. Richard M. Nixon converted a swimming pool into the press briefing room in 1970. The modern East Wing wasn’t even built until World War II to cover up an underground bunker. Harry S. Truman gutted the White House interior and added the balcony that bears his name. Purists decried it. Now it’s a hallmark.”
— Not a single one of these additions was made through a lie or flouting the rule of law. And they were comparatively insignificant in scope or cost. Continuing:
“The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”
— NIMBYs again. They TRIPLED down on the dirt.
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Tomorrow, we’re going to be revisiting The Washington Pist for a brief Round Two. But in the meantime, some solace:
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