Trump’s White House ballroom: a threat to the republic?

“It’s hard to imagine a more fitting image” of Donald Trump’s second term, said Matt Ford in The New Republic, than last week’s photographs of bulldozers demolishing the East Wing of the White House. They are a perfect symbol of the administration’s destructive agenda. A public building that forms part of a national historical site has been razed to make way for a “gaudy” 90,000-square-foot ballroom where Trump can “hang out with his rich friends”.

Back in July, the president assured the public that the ballroom wouldn’t interfere with the current White House structure, said Steve Benen on MSNBC. “It’ll be near it but not touching it – and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he declared. Now he dismisses the East Wing, saying it was “never thought of as being much”. Trump feels entitled to make these choices, because he regards these national treasures “as his own”.

Hysterical nonsense

Get a grip, people, said National Review. All this talk of Trump “destroying” the White House is hysterical nonsense. He’s just replacing some 1940s-era offices with a function room. Changes have been made to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue throughout its history. The West and East wings were built in 1902. The Oval Office was added in 1909 and moved in 1934. The central residence was completely gutted and reconstructed between 1948 and 1952.

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Successive presidents have sought to improve the property. Franklin D. Roosevelt installed an indoor pool; Harry S. Truman added a bowling alley; Barack Obama put in a basketball court. These updates didn’t “imply incipient fascism” or an “inappropriate sense of permanent ownership”; nor does Trump’s.

The White House will benefit from a permanent space for large functions – they currently have to be accommodated in tents on the South Lawn. President Harrison proposed a similar expansion in 1891. Yet activists are now calling for Democrat politicians to commit to razing Trump’s ballroom and restoring the status quo ante, said Noah Rothman in the same magazine. That’s just not going to happen. A future president might strip away some of the ballroom’s garish gold embellishments – which would be no bad thing – but they will undoubtedly keep the space as a whole because of its “immense and objective practical utility”.

High-handed attitude

There’s nothing wrong in principle with expanding the White House, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the context in which this change has been made, and the high-handed manner in which it has been handled, do raise deep concerns about an overmighty executive. In a republic, power is meant to spring from the people and be mediated by balanced branches of government. But in the past nine months a “lot of lines seem to have been crossed”, not least the deployment of troops in US cities and the legal assaults on the president’s perceived enemies.

Trump increasingly resembles Louis XIV, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. He feels no need to justify the extrajudicial killings at sea of those he decrees are Venezuelan narco-terrorists. “Who will it be for?” a reporter asked him recently, when he was showing off the model of a triumphal arch (dubbed the “Arc de Trump”) to be built in Washington. “Me,” he replied.

When millions of Americans took to the streets a fortnight ago for the “No Kings” rally – “perhaps the largest single-day protest in US history” – Trump mocked them by posting an AI-generated video of himself bombarding them with excrement from a fighter jet. He may not care what voters think, but his party certainly should. “Keep the ‘No Kings’ protests coming – right through the elections this November and next.”