[Salon] The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition

When Martha Ellen Truman, the new president’s mother, was told she could sleep in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, she, “her Confederate blood rising, said if that was the choice she would prefer the floor.” (This from David McCullough’s “Truman.”) The building’s floors, however, were sagging.

Upstairs, a floor caved beneath daughter Margaret’s piano. The president, who at one point was stranded in the rickety elevator Theodore Roosevelt had installed, was told his bathroom was about to collapse. An engineer told Harry Truman the State Dining Room’s ceiling stayed in place largely “from force of habit.”

When told that the building’s only secure place was the new balcony, Truman said in perfect Midwestern idiom, “Doesn’t that beat all!” He had been excoriated by the great and the good for the architectural crime of building what today is fondly known as the Truman Balcony.

Donald Trump, who often makes even defensible actions grating, acted on the White House with unapologetic unilateralism. Part of his political strength is that apologies are not in his repertoire. He said the new ballroom would not impact the East Wing. By now, however, the number of his “Oh, never mind” presidential statements contains two commas.Follow

Like a locomotive encountering a cobweb, he blew through whatever regulatory rules or norms pertain to White House alterations. But many Americans think our democracy has become a vetocracy, coagulated by blocking procedures that stop things. Presidential highhandedness in dealing with such procedures is not new.

The National Journal’s George E. Condon Jr. notes that when Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to attach a swing to a tree for her grandchildren, Ulysses S. Grant III, a president’s grandson, and director of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, forbade this “lest it damage the bark” of the tree. Eleanor’s husband fired Grant.

Trump’s ballroom has already served the public good. It has triggered some people who need triggering. They have been blasé about his presidential grandiosity when he spends money for purposes Congress has explicitly refused to authorize (the Big Beautiful Wall), or when he insults local police forces by sending troops to pacify U.S. cities, or when he vaporizes perhaps criminal Venezuelans. Now, however, because of the ballroom, and the East Wing, the blasé are suddenly aghast.

During the fierce late-1970s opposition to conferring on Panama control of the canal there, a U.S. senator said: My state consists of millions of people of diverse political, social, religious, racial, and ethnic beliefs and backgrounds, but they are united by fervent devotion to a canal that they have not thought about since learning of it in high school. Today there is a similar eruption of devotion to the East Wing, the destruction of which is being called a “desecration.” Well. To desecrate is to disrespect a sacred place. Something is sacred when it is venerated because it is associated with worship and religious purposes. Republics do not have sacerdotal offices.

For decades, the constitutional, political, social (and, lately, aesthetic) damages done by the ever-more-swollen modern presidency have become increasingly evident. Congress, in its decades-long siesta, has empowered presidents to unilaterally tax (see: tariffs) and wage war (hello, Venezuela) as they please. Congress is now composed almost entirely of two cohorts: those who do nothing but genuflect to their party’s president, and those who do nothing but caterwaul about him.

It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.

Some skeptics about the ballroom are understandably distraught that it might mimic the aesthetic of Trump’s redecorated Oval Office — gold here, there and everywhere. But a subsequent president can cleanse that space. Indeed, sensible citizens will make their votes contingent on a promise to do that. Nuclear weapons should not be entrusted to anyone pleased by Trump’s Gilded Age Brothel school of interior design.

A presidential spokesperson says, “In large part, he was re-elected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things.” “Re-elected back.” Perfect. Good grammar should not taint this episode.

The leakage of dignity from public life accelerates. Next July 4, for America’s semiquincentennial celebration, the White House will host an Ultimate Fighting Championship match. A World Wrestling Entertainment “fight” would be better — choreographed fakery for people who want even more of this than American politics provides.