White House demolition Trump’s ode to self

2 days ago 5

Opinion

October 26, 2025 — 1.47pm

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.”

Work continues on a largely demolished part of the East Wing of the White House, before construction of a new ballroom.

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.”

The Jackie Kennedy rose garden was demolished to build a patio.

A Jackie Kennedy garden was ploughed 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 New York Times′ 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 petrol station.

When I visited the White House with my mum 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. 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 a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.

Build a huge $US300 million 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 Office; 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 on 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.

“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 criticised tariffs.

Trump, who posts fake AI 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 per cent 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 $US40 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 can check him.

“The Congress is adrift,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told the Times′ 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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