Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out. Read this exclusive extract from the latest edition of The Swamp—then subscribe to keep up to date with the news they don’t want you to know.
Thanks to the thousands of you who subscribe to The Swamp. Did someone forward it to you? Sign up here to stay up to date with the n-ooze.
Moments before Karoline Leavitt stepped into the James Brady Briefing Room last Friday to announce Donald Trump’s pet ballroom addition to the White House, there was a sign that, just this once, the president was thinking too small.
A giant, glass frame containing the founding document for the White House Correspondents’ Association fell crashing to the ground, narrowly missing the heads of several stunned journalists.
“I’m traumatized!” one distressed reporter told The Swamp in the aftermath. Another joked they needed a flak jacket.
Nobody was hurt, and it could have been worse. Like in 1948,, when presidential daughter Margaret Truman’s piano crashed through the floor of her second-floor sitting room and smashed through the ceiling of the family dining room below. After years of White House wear and tear, the place was deemed so unsafe that Margaret’s father, President Harry Truman, was forced to move his wife,surroundings Bess, their daughter, and the entire residence staff across the street to Blair House, where they stayed for three years while the so-called “Truman Reconstruction” took place.
The symbolism of Friday’s falling frame is that maybe it’s time for a complete “Trump Reconstruction.”
What property guy doesn’t love a teardown?
On Tuesday, Trump himself exited the door to the State Dining Room and onto the roof of the Briefing Room for an impromptu 20-minute inspection of his surroundings, including the newly paved Rose Garden below. Maybe he was worried about an insurance claim.
Trump’s plan for a ballroom in the East Wing has a $200 million price tag. It’s hefty, but the rest of the building isn’t cheap either. Want to guess the yearly maintenance costs for the creaking White House?
$16,088,000. This means that since the Obamas stepped through the door, the building has swallowed up roughly the same amount as Trump is preparing to spend.
As much gold and gilt that Trump pours into the tired old bones and as many photos of himself he plasters around the walls, it can’t hide the decay. While those outside may worry about crumbling democracy, inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they worry about the crumbling masonry.
It has to be better than the president’s current strategy of covering the cracks with pictures of him.
In the White House Grand Foyer, for instance, Barack Obama’s official portrait was recently replaced with a giant painting of Trump’s iconic fist-pumping image from last year’s failed assassination attempt.
In the soon to be torn apart East Wing, there’s now a menacing painting of Trump with his face resembling the stars and stripes of the American flag, sandwiched between two elegant portraits of first ladies Patricia Nixon and Laura Bush. “It looks like a high school project,” one White House visitor recently told The Swamp. “It’s so out of place.” Even the entrance to the press offices that house Leavitt and her team have been Trumpified: on the wall is a Trump-signed copy of the U.S. Court of Appeals order allowing the president to bar the Associated Press from the White House Press Pool.
Building a 90,000 sq ft ballroom in the East Wing will double the size of the original building. It will also leave the West Wing looking more like a 1960s Howard Johnson, sans orange roof. A new look could lead to a new name. The White House wasn’t even dubbed “the White House” until 1901 when Theodore Roosevelt started using that term. Before that, it was simply known as “the executive mansion.”
So look for Trump to rebrand after the redesign. What is valued and enduring and certain to get signed off by its current occupant?
The Gold House: A Trump International Hotel.
This exclusive extract from this week’s edition of The Swamp is just a taste of the delicious secrets we reveal every week. Sign up here to never miss an edition.
The post This is The Real Danger to Journalists In the West Wing appeared first on The Daily Beast.
