"White House Makeover"

 

Here's last night's SNL skit of the "White House Makeover" by the Scott brothers (a.k.a., Property Brothers).  Miles Teller plays both brothers, James Austin Johnson is the Malignant Fascist, and Chloe Fineman is Melon. 

Architecture And Authoritarianism

 

There's an excellent article in The Conversation by archaeologist R. Grant Gilmore III about the relationship between architectural styles and authoritarian rule that points out several things that deranged narcissist the Malignant Fascist is doing with his makeover of Washington: the gaudy royal ballroom that the East Wing had to make way for, and the "Arc de Trump" at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.  Some excerpts from the article, with our emphasis added:

"In his first term as president, and even more so today, Donald Trump has pushed to an extreme legacy-building through architecture and heritage policy. He is remaking the White House physically and metaphorically in his image, consistent with his long record of putting his name on buildings as a developer.

In December 2020, Trump issued an executive order declaring classical and traditional architectural styles the “preferred” design for new federal buildings. The order derided Brutalist and modernist structures as inconsistent with national values.

Now, Trump is seeking to roll back inclusive historical narratives at U.S. parks and monuments. And he is reviving sanitized myths about America’s history of slavery, misogyny and Manifest Destiny, for use in museums, textbooks and public schools."

Dictators and authoritarians use architecture in building monuments to themselves, and the MF's massive neediness has meant the construction of temples to his own ego:

"Many leaders throughout history have built “temples to power” while erasing or overshadowing the memory of their predecessors – a practice known as damnatio memoriae, or condemnation to oblivion. [snip]

Albert Speer’s and Hermann Giesler’s monumental neoclassical designs in Nazi Germany, such as the party rally grounds in Nuremberg, were intended to overwhelm the individual and glorify the regime. And Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union suppressed avant-garde experimentation in favor of monumental “socialist realist” architecture, projecting permanence and centralized power.

Now, Trump has proposed building his own triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, as a symbol to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence." 

Gilmore explains that the MF is using architecture to send a message of exclusion and dominance: 

"In remaking the White House and prescribing the style and content of many federal sites, Trump is targeting not just buildings but the stories they tell.

By challenging narratives that depart from white, Anglo-Saxon origin myths, Trump is using his power to roll back decades of work toward creating a more inclusive national history.

These actions ignore the fact that America’s strength lies in its identity as a nation of immigrants."

There's much more in Gilmore's article that's well worth the read.  It clarifies what the MF is intending to not only build, but to destroy in his wake.

(photo: The dictator and his ballroom / Aaron Schwartz, EPA,  Shutterstock)

 

We Will Tear It Down!

 

JV Last asks the right questions and comes to the right conclusions about destroying the East Wing of the White House to make way for the Donald J. Trump Bribe and Grift Ballroom ($$):

... Is a president really allowed to do this?

This is a serious question: Is the president the owner of the White House? Can he do literally anything he wants to it? Could he knock down the whole thing and replace it with a ten-story Brutalist cube?

I guess so.

The good news is this means that the next Democratic inhabitant of the White House can demolish the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom and Casino and restore the East Wing and the rest of the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.  [snip]

Undoing the authoritarian project is not a “distraction.” It is the single most important job of the next Democratic administration.

Real talk: “Undoing the authoritarian project” will be incredibly hard when it comes to salvaging the Department of Justice, dissolving ICE, reallocating DHS functions to more professionalized forces, making the District of Columbia a state (in order to safeguard the rights of its citizens), and reforming the Supreme Court.

The authoritarians are counting on this being difficult. They believe that the ratchet turns only one way. That they can do what they will and even in the unlikely event they are turned out of office this time, they can come storming back to finish the job.

It is maximally important to demonstrate—both to the authoritarians and those who oppose them—that the ratchet can go in reverse. That authoritarian gains are not permanent. That liberal society has the will to undo their grotesqueries...

This also goes for the "arch" that the Malignant Fascist is planning to put at one end of the Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC, meant to mimic L'Arc de Triomphe, and every single fascistic element the MF has introduced into our polity.  Let it start with the physical embodiments, but let it continue until the de-Nazification has been completed and America, though stained forever and weakened, will never have to worry about fascism inside its borders again.

And, whenever an oligarch or corporation has paid to construct one of the MF's monuments to himself, send them the bill for demolition and restoration! 

(Photo:  the MF and his $200  $250  $300 million gilded ballroom bribe and grift center / screenshot via ABC News) 

QOTD -- Suppressing Indignation

 

"...I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.

"It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.  [snip]

"But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.

"Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself..." -- Brian Beutler, in his "Off Message" Substack, on how Democratic consultants and their Democratic politician clients react to shocking developments like the illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for the "Epstein ballroom."  Beutler likens the difference between how Democrats react and Republicans react to having your finger in the wind to see which way it's blowing (Democrats) and making the weather (Republicans).  

There's nothing more visceral to most Americans than seeing the sudden destruction of part one of the iconic structures of our democracy, a house that belongs to the American people, not to a lawless, convicted felon temporarily living there.  Why hasn't this penetrated some political skulls by now?  We realize the fire hose of outrages is coming fast and furious out of the Malignant Fascist and his regime.  But this outrage against the American people, symbolic as well as tangible, deserves much, much more than a brush off from accommodating, tin eared politicians.

(Photo:  a scar where the East Wing of the White House once was)

The List Of Shame

 

Yesterday, the White House released the list of corporations and individuals who have contributed to the narcissistic Malignant Fascist's monstrous, vulgar ballroom that is replacing the destroyed East Wing of the White House.  From CNN:

"As demolition crews this week bulldozed the White House’s East Wing to replace it with a massive ballroom, President Donald Trump has emphasized that the dramatic changes will come at “zero cost to the American Taxpayer.”

Instead, the donors picking up the tab include some of the country’s biggest corporations, including many who have business before the federal government, along with many longtime supporters of the president, according to a CNN review of a donor list released by the Trump administration.

Trump has been recruiting donors for the construction project for months, showing off renderings and scale models to Oval Office visitors. Now estimated to cost $300 million, the work is being funded by private, tax-deductible donations routed through the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall.

The president has said he will personally pay for some of the project, but the White House hasn’t specified how much. At least one donation of $22 million from Google was made on 'behalf' of Trump as part of a legal settlement over the president being banned from YouTube in 2021, court documents show.

The ballroom donors were feted at a White House dinner last week. Now that the demolition has begun, here’s who’s paying for the overhaul of the country’s most famous residence." (our emphasis)

The list that follows has a capsule description of each donor. It's a who's who of corporations and individuals that have curried favor with the MF in the past, like Amazon, Meta, Apple, Palantir, and lots of cryptocurrency moguls.  It's simple bribery couched as civic philanthropy.  Also, if anyone thinks that the Malignant Fascist, who is barred from operating a charity in New York due to previous fraud, will donate his money, they should have their head examined.

As several commentators have suggested, any Dem running for President, or Federal office for that matter, should make it clear to these corrupt donors that the MF's monument to his sick ego will be coming down and the East Wing restored when they return to office, using their bribe money if there's any left.

BONUS:  Not surprisingly, the autocrat's demolition isn't going over well --

 

Only 24% approve, and less than half of Republicans, of demolition at White House

[image or embed]

— Timothy McBride (@mcbridetd.bsky.social) October 24, 2025 at 6:10 AM

 

BONUS II:   Electoral- vote has the list along with possible motivation for each of the collaborators.

(photo: Aerial view of the massive demolition. Planet Labs / PBC)

 

Trump Begins Defacing White House

 

Although it could be successfully argued that the Malignant Fascist defaced the White House the moment he first stepped over the threshold, an egregious physical defacing is now underway in service to the megalomaniac's desire to have his own imperial ballroom constructed:

Demolition crews on Monday began tearing down part of the White House to build President Donald Trump’s long-desired ballroom despite his pledge that construction of the $250 million addition wouldn’t “interfere” with the existing building.  [Ed. -- Shocker! He lied.]

Construction teams were demolishing a portion of the East Wing, with a backhoe ripping through the structure, according to a photo shared with The Washington Post and two people who witnessed the activity and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

A cluster of people, including members of the Secret Service, stood on the steps of the Treasury Department to watch the construction unfold, said one of the people. Sounds of construction were also audible on the White House campus, although the project was not easily visible to the public given fencing on the grounds.  [snip]

Trump has long touted his plans for a 90,000-square-foot structure that would nearly double the footprint of the main building and its East and West wings. He had also suggested that the construction would not affect the existing White House. 

“It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump said during an executive order signing in July. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe construction on the ballroom, confirmed that the demolition process on the East Wing began Monday. Other parts of the project, such as efforts to preserve objects of historical value, have been underway for several weeks, the official said.

Officials declined to provide an explanation for Trump’s earlier comments that the new construction would not interfere with the existing building. Officials have separately said that the ballroom would replace the East Wing, noting the many changes made to that structure long before Trump’s presidency. [snip]

The administration also said that it expected construction to begin by September, detailing plans to make some of the most significant changes to “the People’s House” in a century. Trump originally estimated the project would cost $200 million to build but has since upped that to $250 million.  [snip]

Trump last week also touted his planned ballroom during a dinner with executives from the tech, finance and defense industries, telling them that the project was fully financed after receiving donations as large as $25 million from dozens of companies, including Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Coinbase. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

That's right, all the go- along- to- get- along colluding companies and their billionaire execs chipped in millions to see that the desecration of the White House grounds became a reality in order to make the MF happy.  There's no going back to the way things were before the MF's assault on America.  But at least when the MF and his craven catchfarts and enablers are gone, one of the first actions in de-Nazifying America must be to demolish this ballroom that's a symbol of the MF's imperial pretensions, and send the bill for demo and reconstruction to the spineless corporations that paid for it.  No Kings in America!

(Photo:  let the defacing begin! / screenshot via WaPo)