Donald Trump has literally taken a wrecking ball to the White House — and US courts seem helpless to stop him.
The East Wing was destroyed without civic debate or congressional approval – and is now in the process of being replaced by a 90,000 square foot
luxury ballroom that is double the size of the current White House complex.
That is an insult to the rule of law, to American history, and to every US citizen — because the White House ultimately belongs to us, not its current temporary occupant.
If you don’t believe this is a dangerous precedent, get your head around this: The Trump administration’s Department of Justice lawyers even argued in court that a president could order the Statue of Liberty demolished and there would be functionally nothing anyone could do about it because the courts would move too slowly to stop him.
The Supreme Court just proved them right. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three Democratic-appointed justices in trying to halt the destruction of the East Wing. Roberts wrote that the construction is likely unlawfulbecause Congress never approved it.
He’s got the facts on his side. The Constitution gives Congress the power to make all rules respecting “property belonging to the United States.” For two centuries the White House has been renovated and maintained through congressional authorization and appropriation. Alteration and improvement of the executive residence has never meant unilateral demolition.
But in an assault on precedent, Roberts and the Democratic Justices were outvoted by the other five Republican court appointees, who, in an unsigned order, said nothing about whether the project was legal. They said only that the National Trust for Historic Preservation likely lacked standing to sue.
So who does have standing if they don’t? The answer should be “any American citizen.” This is our history and our legacy. There are laws to ensure that no president can act like a king and destroy historic public property on a whim.
The National Trust stated the principle plainly after the ruling. “We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court’s ruling today,” said its president and CEO, Brent Leggs. The order “does not resolve our fundamental argument: that each president is a temporary steward of the People’s House and does not have the unilateral authority to demolish and redesign it without the approval of Congress,” concluding that the Trust “will continue to advocate, with our partners, on behalf of the American people, the democratic values of our nation, and the preservation of our country’s most historically significant places.”
But the Trump bum rush goes on. By the government’s own account in court filings, a 250-person crew has been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, ignoring lower court riders. The administration told the courts the structure is “beyond the point of return.” The goal is a fait accompli: by the time judges definitively rule on legality, the ballroom will be built.
This is an Atlantic City mob-boss tactic, and it fits a pattern. Trump has tried to remake the Kennedy Center in his own image. He paved the Rose Garden. He’s building a massive triumphal arch and suggested naming it after himself. He has slapped gilded skid marks on every surface of the White House. The gilding can be scraped off. Buildings cannot be un-demolished.
If you have any doubt that this is all about Trump’s endlessly needy ego, listen to the Don himself: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
Then there’s the money. Trump promised that the ballroom would be built with “ZERO Dollars of Taxpayer Money” – funded by himself and donors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Coinbase – corporations that understand every decision with this president is transactional. But the price tag swelled from $200 million to $400 million in five months. A side staircase to nowhere disappeared and then reappeared. The contractor’s own estimate now puts the real cost at $600 million, with roughly half that coming from the Secret Service and the White House. That’s your money. Senate Republicans proposed another $1 billion in federal money for “security adjustments and upgrades” tied to the project. The donors get naming rights. Taxpayers get the bill.
If you want to know how a mob boss runs a public works project, look at the Reflecting Pool. The job went, no-bid, to a contractor Trump said had built one of his own swimming pools. A firm with actual Reflecting Pool experience had passed because the July 4 deadline was unworkable. The blue coating peeled. Algae took over. So the boss found a guy to take the fall. The guy was David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist accused of massive vandalism with a box cutter – a felony carrying up to 10 years. His crime, by his account, was stopping to look and dipping his hand in the water. Then Jeanine Pirro broke omertà and uncharacteristically told the truth. On July 31, she moved to dismiss the charges, writing that the rush produced hasty, botched work in the reflecting pool. But Roy Cohen’s clients never admit making a mistake. They double down on the lie. So Trump disagreed “100 percent.” He expects his lawyers to lie on his behalf. Lincoln’s mirror is now a $14 million mudhole.
Republicans would be screaming bloody murder if a Democratic president tried anything remotely like this. And they’d be right to. Principles don’t matter if you abandon them whenever a president of your own party does as he pleases. The guardrails that once relied on a president’s common sense and common decency clearly cannot be taken for granted anymore.
So here is a modest proposal. The Democrats running for president should pledge to take down Trump’s luxury ballroom and rebuild the East Wing as it was, restoring the historic symmetry of the White House. Whatever underground security structures have been built should stay: anything practical and related to national security belongs there. But the monument to one man’s ego above ground should be swept into the ash-heap of history.
When the remaining Republican justices finally solve the mystery of who has standing to stop the destruction of the White House it will be after Trump leaves office. They will conclude the demolition was illegal — and then declare on those grounds that the next president cannot possibly demolish Trump’s ballroom. But that would let the crime stand without any accountability. The purpose of this proposal is not to perpetuate Trump’s cycle of destruction but to end it, by ensuring there is a consequence for breaking the law, and making sure it can never happen again.
Trump took a wrecking ball to the People’s House. The people should reserve the right to take one to his ballroom.
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