Among the innumerable crimes and transgressions of the Trump administration this one somehow hit the hardest. When I saw the footage of a construction claw mindlessly assaulting the East Wing of the White House, turning the elegant, understated facade into rubble my reaction was visceral. The ugly confusion of debris, the dust and exposed wires, reminded me of the destruction at Ground Zero on 9/11. It had all the markings of a terrorist attack, except that the author of the assault was the President of the United States.
Almost everything this second Trump administration does shocks but doesn’t surprise me. In fact, when the American people in their bizarre wisdom reelected a convicted felon and a con artist that had tried to arrest the peaceful transfer of power I thought that Donald Trump was justified in getting away with anything that he could. We’d been forewarned. When I hear of bankrupt Midwestern soybean farmers lamenting having voted for him — though some confess they’d do it over again — I have little sympathy for them. Does that make me a bad person? If so, I proudly wear the title. Fool me once… You know how the saying goes.
The reason that I’m focusing on the demolition project isn’t because of Trump’s actions but because of my appalled reaction. I was frankly a bit surprised by the helpless rage that washed over me. I didn’t realize how patriotic I was. I fully subscribe to John Lennon’s sentiments in Imagine. “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too.”…
If anybody needed proof that our commander-in-chief was taking a wrecking ball to democracy look no further. The odds aren’t much better than 50/50 that when we celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary next year all that will remain of the Founders vision will be that clearing dust cloud on Pennsylvania Avenue, replaced by a ballroom perhaps paid in part by Bitcoin pardon recipients. And then there’s the triumphal arch proposed to upstage the Lincoln Memorial. Napoleon would be impressed.
I suspect that I’m far from alone in my revulsion. This story has legs. It’s apparently struck a nerve with the American people, though likely not the Trump base. If he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue he certainly has license to destroy the People’s House. To make it bigger and more beautiful. Why stop with the East Wing? What's so great about the West Wing? Why not tear the whole thing down and replace it with a palace, its pillars spelling out Trump in solid gold, or rather gold-plated, letters?
This isn’t the first time Trump has destroyed an inconvenient piece of American history. In 1980, he demolished the splendid Art Deco Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue and 56th street to make way for Trump Tower. He even reneged on his promise to the Metropolitan Museum to donate to the institution two fifteen-foot tall Art Deco sculptures from the facade. One would have thought that their subject matter — naked women — would have given him pause.
The White House and I go way back. I saw it for the first time in person when I was ten-years-old. My mother took a friend and me to Washington over spring break. “It was very interesting,” she wrote in her diary, “but they didn’t show very much.” The West Wing, where the action is, was off-limits to tourists like us. I recall that I bought a bronze model of the building as well as a book about the history of the White House.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I wormed my way past the security guard post and into the West Wing. I was on assignment for Cosmopolitan magazine, writing a story about women working in the Clinton administration.
I spent several days on the campus. I scored notepads at the White House employee gift shop printed “The White House. Washington.” I thought that the Oval Office was the loveliest office that I’d ever seen. Not because it was grand but because it wasn’t. It was tastefully understated with sunlight streaming through large windows facing the Rose Garden. Or rather the former Rose Garden now that it’s been replaced by a patio.
I returned and took the visitor’s tour with my family in the early 2000’s when my children were about the age I was on my first visit. We entered through the East Wing visitor’s entrance. I was back again in the 2010’s. I was in D.C. working on a different story that didn’t involve the White House. But I convinced someone in the White House press office to issue me a visitor’s pass even though President Obama and the press corps were out of town that day. I just wanted, one more time, to experience the thrill of passing through the security gate and walking up the driveway to the West Wing.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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