(Dobbs) "You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want."“These are changes that can’t be undone. They’re destroying that history forever.”
Well, the damage is done. The East Wing of the White House is demolished. That’s a far cry from Donald Trump’s duplicitous assurance only two-and-a-half months ago about building his new mega-ballroom: “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it.” Of course the last part is true, because thanks to the wrecking ball, there is nothing left to touch. This has hit a raw nerve in me. In the bigger scheme of things— a shaky truce in Gaza, the unending war in Ukraine, the extra-judicial executions on the high seas, the government shutdown at home— destroying the East Wing is not the most momentous story facing us. But it is significant, not just because of what it means to the iconic home of every president after George Washington, but because of what it says to us: that Donald Trump answers to nobody, that Donald Trump truly believes what he has publicly declared, that he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” No, Mr. Trump. Kings have a right to do whatever they want. Louis XIV called it his “droit divin,” his “divine right.” Presidents, on the other hand, don’t. That’s what last weekend’s No Kings marches were about. Presidents are supposed to answer to the people. Or at least explain their actions to the people. Especially when they’re ripping down a wing of the People’s House. Of course typical of Trump, he started lying from the moment at the end of July when he announced the project. LIE #1 Referring to the ballroom, he said, “It won’t touch the East Wing.” As it turns out, the first thing to touch the East Wing Monday morning was a backhoe. He even had the gall say the new ballroom “pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” All we can assume is, this is Trump’s idea of respect. LIE #2 A couple of days ago, after it became undeniable that the East Wing would not survive, the president told reporters in the Oval Office, “In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure.” Isn’t this guy supposed to be the creme de la creme of developers? Shouldn’t he have known that before we saw it with our own eyes? What do you think: that the whole scale of the project changed between the end of July and October, or that our developer-in-chief just lied, yet again? LIE #3 This one came through White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles: she said in a statement when the announcement first was made that the president is “fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserve the special history of the White House.” That’s a lie for two reasons. First, because “the appropriate organizations” pleaded with him to stop destroying the East Wing. And second, because he ripped it apart, he didn’t preserve a thing. As Towson University political scientist Martha Joynt Kumar put it to The Washington Post, “These are changes that can’t be undone. They’re destroying that history forever.” LIE(S) #4 In the short time since the announcement, both the cost and the size of the structure appreciably shot up. From $200 million to $300 million. >From a capacity of 650 people to Trump’s most recent figure of “999.” And the footprint of the ballroom itself has grown to 90,000 square feet. To put that in perspective, the square footage of the main building of the White House is only 55,000 square feet. Trump likely always knew that something this grand, on a scale this inappropriate, was what he planned to build. He just didn’t say so. LIE #5 Trump said this week that he “didn’t want to dwarf anything.” Really? Yet another lie. A scale model that he proudly laid out in the Oval Office tells the truth. The National Trust for Historic Preservation says the ballroom will “overwhelm the White House itself.” LIE #6 After coming clean this week that the whole East Wing was coming down, the White House called it a “modernization and renovation.” I’m sorry, but maybe the White House needs to buy a dictionary. Calling it modernization is another lie. It is demolition. LIE #7 All employees at the headquarters of the Treasury Department, which is just across from the East Wing, were ordered Monday not to share photos of the demolition. That alone speaks volumes, but it gets worse. Treasury told CNN that the purpose of prohibiting photographs was to protect “sensitive information” about the White House complex. Which is a sham. If it’s so sensitive, they’d have built a tall wall years ago. So what’s really so sensitive? Maybe that the backhoes, made by Volvo, aren’t American products? We know how mad the president gets about that! To be sure, it’s not as if the East Wing is…. oops, was…. something holy. It wasn’t built until 1902. And, as Trump’s reflexively prickly mouthpieces have pointed out, previous presidents have made changes in and around the White House over the years, although none has been nearly on the scale of this one. But that’s not what the uproar is about. It’s about Trump’s disdain for accountability, even just for other people’s earnest opinions. Despite pleas from the National Trust for Historic Preservation “to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes,” and from the Society of Architectural Historians to “follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process,” Trump ground the East Wing to dust, which sent them a message that said in effect, “We don’t need no stinkin’ architectural reviews.” Or put in the bigger context, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” He even bragged a couple of days ago about how easy it was to get the demolition started. “They said, ‘Sir, you can start tonight.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.’” The trouble is, he really believes it. He didn’t go through channels because he doesn’t think he has to. It’s not his house of course, but he treats it as if it is. Tuesday, the White House put out a news release about this whole sorry mess and as it is wont to do, rather than just lay out the facts of Trump’s ballroom plan, it attacked everyone who’s angry about how he’s going about it: “In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.” But it’s the title that tells the story: “White House Ballroom Continues Proud Presidential Legacy.” That’s the story because Donald Trump’s presidential legacy is one of deception and lies, contempt for constructive norms and over-inflated self-importance. If he thinks he’s above the law, and there’s a mountain of proof that he does, then why wouldn’t he be above everything else too? Leave a comment Two Democratic critics from the United States Senate summarized the meaning of what’s happening. From Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, “You are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is, about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.” From Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, posting on X above a photo of the remains of the East Wing, “This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo.” Yes, we are “clutching our pearls.” Not just for the East Wing. But for the people’s republic that once was. Share Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. You can learn more at GregDobbs.net |