Donald Trump's $300 Million Playpen
Trump can find money for a vanity project, but not for SNAP recipients
[Note: I actually filed this for the NYT ten days ago but it sort of lingered in the workflow and by the end of the week, they deemed it something that had already been written about too much. I still like it, so I'm publishing it here. The only material change to the draft is that I had to increase the estimated cost of the ballroom by $100 million to reflect the newer numbers. Donald Trump's avarice is always increasing, never decreasing. This is the unedited version, so apologies in advance for typos, etc.]
When babies are around eight months old, they develop a sense of object permanence, meaning they begin to understand that if they can’t see or hear something, it doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. Last week, as Donald Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House in order to construct a 90,000 square foot, $300 million ballroom, I couldn’t help but think that his view of history and his place in it is similar–that of a baby who cannot conceive that anything exists outside of their own immediate perception. For Trump, the White House has no real history before him, outside of him, or after him, and neither does America.
Trump’s obsession with his new ballroom–the largest renovation to the White House since President Harry Truman repaired and expanded the West Wing–has eclipsed so many other priorities in his brain that he brings it up constantly, even in inappropriate circumstances. When a reporter asked how he was holding up after the shooting death of Charlie Kirk, supposedly a close friend and ally, Trump replied that he was doing “very good” and immediately started boasting about his pet project. “They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years,” he said. “And it’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be absolutely magnificent structure.”
Contrary to Trump’s insinuation that unspecified parties have been begging for this ballroom for 150 years, no one asked for this. It is simply an extension of Trump’s ego, preferences and vanity, and a continuation of extreme changes he’s already made to the White House, including paving over the Rose Garden in order to make it look more like Mar-A-Lago. If it’s consistent with the decor preferences he has already imposed on the rest of the White House, it will be ostentatious, and if it matches the rest of the White House’s Trump imposed aesthetic scheme, it will feature enough gold accents to make even the Sultan of Brunei cringe.
But it’s not Trump’s crimes against taste that matter; it’s that he has no respect for what the White House represents, historically, and to the American people. In contrast, Truman began renovations on the West Wing after it became clear that it was in such a state of disrepair that it was on the verge of being uninhabitable. Much of it was a fire hazard, a function of having modernized the building for electricity under Coolidge, and load bearing structures were straining under too much pressure. But tearing down the outside walls of it in the process was unthinkable to Truman. “It would have seemed an act of desecration,” wrote Truman biographer David McCullough. “[He] never considered the idea.”
Truman did not pursue the renovations unilaterally, either. A Congressional commission was established and the head of the American Institute of Architects was included, as well as members of the House and Senate. Truman went to great lengths to preserve the materials, designs and intentions of the original structure, and prepared to donate elements that were removed to museums and organizations that would make use of them.
Trump is simply doing this because he wants to. At the beginning of his first term, he described the White House as “a real dump” and resented having to stay there–so much so that he spent much of his down time at his various properties in New Jersey and Florida, and continues to do so. But as with many things that belong to the public, Trump views the White House as his property. His self-conception does not involve or necessitate a reality where he works at the behest of the public, and more often than not, he believes the public should work for him. As a result, he feels he is entitled to luxuries at taxpayer expense, or gifted in the hopes of favorable treatment. (It’s not as if the Qataris were not simply feeling generous when they gave him a $400 million plane.)
This is in keeping with his general orientation toward public service, which in the Trump formulation, is about the public’s responsibilities to him instead of the other way around. He is indignant when the public fails to genuflect, or worse, expresses disapproval or anger, as demonstrated this week when he posted an AI generated animation of himself wearing a crown in a fighter jet and dropping a load of feces on Americans who were protesting. It was a petulant, childish response from a petulant, childish man who believes the office of the presidency exists for his personal use and has no real significance beyond that.
Trump has always been like this. New Yorkers old enough to remember the construction of Trump Tower may recall that in 1980 he tore down the historically significant Bonwit Teller building, which he acquired out of bankruptcy for $15 million. Bonwit Teller was designed by the architects of Grand Central Terminal and featured, among other invaluable works of art, two Art Deco friezes, which Trump promised to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, he destroyed them, and when faced with a public uproar about it, he claimed, using a pseudonym to speak to the press, ”John Barron”, that unnamed experts had determined that they had “no artistic value.” Trump has always been a prolific liar–so much so that SPY magazine reported that a mob-connected friend of his claimed “he’d lie to you about what time of day it was, just for the practice”--but not a particularly good one. The Met’s experts had already determined that the works had value, and Trump’s biographer later confirmed that Trump himself ordered his workers to dismantle them and drop them into the interior, where they shattered on impact. Trump also accidentally confirmed it himself at a party when he described gold mylar (of course) table directions as “Real art, not like the junk I destroyed at Bonwit Teller.”
Trump’s disregard for things that other people consider precious, valuable, and historically significant is largely a function of his disregard for other people generally. He is the consummate solipsist–a man who believes mind is the only one that really exists, and the rest of reality is a fiction that either conforms to his desires or, much to his irritation, outrageously subverts them. As such, he sees no problem with spending $300 million on a gilded ballroom in the middle of a government shutdown, while many Americans are struggling to afford food, housing and healthcare thanks to his draconian program of cuts to government services and arbitrary destructive tariff regimes.
If he has a historical analog, it’s probably Marie Antionette, but not for the reason you think. She probably never said “let them eat cake” when told that the poor were starving, though the archetype is so well understood that a variation of that story exists in many cultures. She did, however, spend lavishly and recklessly, contributing to the country’s financial crisis and earning the moniker “Madame Deficit.” She bizarrely sympathized with France’s enemies, and when the king gave her a chalet, she supposedly festooned it in gold and diamonds, which sounds like someone we know.
Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that inspires regular citizens to take up revolution–or in modern times, to take to the streets to reaffirm that we have no kings in this country. Trump is not the introspective sort, and would not view Marie Antoinette’s deposition and beheading as a cautionary tale. But as he gleefully promotes his outrageously expensive adult sized playroom against the backdrop of forced austerity for everyone else, he probably should. Trump has no respect for the building or the office of the White House, but that does not mean they cease to be important in the minds of Americans or that they will tolerate his gaudy vandalism of both. He will learn, one way or the other, that America can and will exist without him.
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Thanks so much for reading!
Elizabeth