The East Wing of the White House is gone; Donald Trump had it bulldozed last week to make room for an inevitably gaudy, oversized, uglier-than-hell ballroom in his signature "what a 12-year-old thinks New Classical architecture looks like" style. I will be honest with you: I am not sentimental about the East Wing of the White House. Like every American not named Donald Trump, including all of those lately pretending to think a big White House ballroom is a good idea, I have no actual considered opinion on the relative value of a big ballroom compared to whatever they used the East Wing for before tearing it down. I am just grossed out by each next extension of the stain this scuzzy, worthless, vulgarian piece of shit is leaving on the world, each of which means some greater quantity and intensity of work will have to go into scouring it off once he finally, finally fucking drops dead.
The Wall Street Journal published a big triple-bylined reported jam on Saturday, titled "How Trump Barreled Through D.C.'s Bureaucracy to Get His White House Ballroom," detailing, well, what the headline says, more or less. The "how," if you're actually wondering, is pretty well summarized by this bit, from the article:
[Firing members of the National Capital Planning Commission and replacing them with loyalists whose only function is to rubber-stamp his plans] was a classic example of the former real-estate developer in action: bulldozing through norms, exerting control over groups that might stand in his way, taking advantage of oddities in permitting rules and acting so quickly that nobody could stop him.
In other words, he behaved like an entitled rich boy inoculated by his birth station against developing accountability or a conscience. Got it. I for one wasn't already sure of this, and have had my head caught in a dryer duct for the past 45 years.
But the actually illuminating part of the story comes much farther along, only a few paragraphs up from the bottom:
For now, the president runs a weekly meeting about the ballroom in the Oval Office—which also bears his decorating touches, including gold onlays and gold trim along the fireplace and other surfaces. The sessions feature his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and have included discussions with architects, residence staff, the White House maintenance team, the military office and the White House Historical Association, to which Trump donated $50 million in January.
As no shortage of readers quickly noted online, this is pure make-work bullshit. They have our slush-brained, visibly melting, 900-year-old president picking out curtain patterns and reviewing paint swatches while the people actually running his administration—most prominently Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—gut and cripple federal agencies, slaughter random boaters within range of their drones, and turn the U.S. military and masked kidnapping squads against the people simply working and living and caring for each other in this country instead of draining its blood like a big spray-tanned dog tick. In this respect his second term as president is not so different from his first, when for a significant period the closest thing to actual duties he had in his own White House was showing visitors around the Oval Office.
On the one hand this image—of Donald Trump coasting down the home stretch of a life that has proved ruinous to everything you can see pretty much no matter how far you zoom out, shouting More gold! at Earth's least scrupulous interior decorator while his nasty underlings set about deliberately casting misery and death as far out into the world as they can manage—is infuriating and depressing, as is every other reminder of the monstrous sucking void at the center of American life and the class of vain, avaricious little pig-men who constitute its bottomless appetite. On the other hand it reminds me that Donald Trump is extremely old, and that with judicious application of leafy green vegetables and reasonable cardiovascular exercise, someday not too far off you and I may get to be glad to have outlived him. Fine: tacky gold filigree for him, and for just about everybody else the faintest hint of a silver lining.
