Before the orange cyclone hit town, Washington was a far more staid place.
Al Gore loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics. One dinner was devoted to the meaning of metaphor. “I l-i-i-ke metaphors,” Gore drawled to The Washington Post when he was vice president. “The more complex and arcane the better.”
What must Gore make of the unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing by Donald Trump? It’s the most remarkable metaphor we’ve ever seen in the nation’s capital. It’s not complex or arcane. It’s simple and visceral. It slams you in the face — metaphorically speaking.
“He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!’” said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. “In this case, it’s sundering history.
“If you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.”
A Jackie Kennedy garden was plowed over by the bulldozers. The woman with the best taste in the history of the White House was rubbished by the man with the worst taste in the history of the White House.
Many of his voters wanted to see Trump take a jackhammer to Washington, but I’m not sure they meant it this literally.
Melania probably doesn’t care. As The Times’s Katie Rogers reported in her book about first ladies, “American Woman,” Melania only dropped by the East Wing, which held the offices for the first lady and her staff, a couple of times in the first term. She hasn’t been around much this term either.
Treasury Department employees, who work opposite the razing, were warned not to share pictures of it. There must be a sense that it’s profane, as it was in 1980 when Trump smashed Bonwit Teller’s limestone friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to build Trump Tower. The friezes had little artistic merit, said a “vice president” of the Trump company, identified as “John Baron” — a fake name Trump used, he acknowledged while testifying in a lawsuit over his use of hundreds of illegal Polish immigrants for the demolition.
But Trump has so little respect for this 123-year-old symbol of American history that he didn’t check with federal planning officials or Congress before he obliterated one side of the White House. As if he’s tearing down a gas station.
When I visited the White House with my mom as a kid, we loved overhearing foreign tourists ooh and ahh about how relatively small and modest the house was. Its simplicity was part of its charm. We didn’t have the grand castles of the European nobility we were trying to shed. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.
Trump does not do small or modest. He does big, flashy odes to self. The joke when Trump was first running was that he’d slap his name on the White House facade as he did with all his other properties. And now it’s happening. White House officials are saying Trump will name the ballroom after himself.
It’s another example, as Rahm Emanuel says, that Trump wants to rule, not govern.
“He believes that the only thing you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest,” Axelrod said.
The president has the kind of blot-out-the-sun narcissism that spurs him to do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on him. He ignores the law, procedures, consequences.
It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.
Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said Thursday. “We’re going to kill them.”
Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain — things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high.
Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien wrote that in seeking private funding for the ballroom, Trump may encourage influence-peddling — grifting off the presidency even more.
After turning the Justice Department into his own vigilante posse, Trump now wants to warp the once-esteemed department even more. He has made a cockamamie demand that Justice give him $230 million as compensation for previous federal investigations of him. The Times editorial board called it “a breathtaking act of self-dealing.”
Trump once thought nothing of aiming to overthrow the government he ran. Now he thinks nothing of threatening to sue the government he runs if he isn’t allowed to pay himself a quarter-billion dollars.
“We the People” is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.
Trump stopped trade talks with Canada on Friday because he did not like an ad commissioned by the province of Ontario that quoted from a radio address President Ronald Reagan made that criticized tariffs.
Trump, who posts fake A.I. slop, called the ad “FAKE.” (Reagan’s quotes were accurate but were in a different order.) The Canadians paused it.
It was like when Trump levied a 50 percent unilateral tariff on Brazil because it had the temerity to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro, who also tried to steal an election when he was president. Or when Trump mused about bailing out his right-wing ally in Argentina, potentially to the tune of $40 billion, and promised to quadruple the amount of Argentine beef allowed into this country at a lower tariff rate — infuriating struggling American ranchers.
Trump can indulge any crazy impulse and nobody is able to check him.
“The Congress is adrift,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told The Times’s Carl Hulse, on overseeing Trump’s legally questionable military moves and vindictive tariffs. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”
Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.
We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate — and not the fun Halloween kind.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
The post Burnin’ Down the House appeared first on New York Times.
