An East Wing Post Mortem.
This has been a very revealing series of events however, and we can take some things away from it.
The first thing we have learned is how utterly desperate Donald Trump is to amount to something. He started too late in life and his character is too fixed in order to achieve that, absent late in life inspiration of an existential type which would require him to make a profound change in his behavior. Born into wealth and a playboy by character, he's desperately trying to buy and build himself into seriousness and relevance. In the back of his mind, or frankly maybe in the forefront, he knows that he's a fart in a windstorm. After he's out of office, and no amount of far right fantasizing is going to keep him there, his successor, right or left, will begin the process of trying to repair the damage Trump has done. If its a right wing leader, like wannabe NatCon J. D. Vance, it'll be National Conservative far right, but less insane than Trump. It probably won't be Vance however, but somebody from the political center, particularly if the Democrats get their act together and dump their own wackadoodle far left, which there are signs they will, or from the actual libertarian populist right.
My prediction, early though it is, is that the next President will be Tammy Duckworth, maybe on a Duckworth Klobuchar ticket. I can see, however, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul taking a run at Vance's dreams and keeping them from happening.
Vance would keep the Trump monument to himself up and pretend to like it, as he only is where he is now due to Trump, but as soon as somebody who wasn't a Trump sycophant is in the Oval Office, it's coming down. That will be symbolic of the entire Trump legacy, destruction that will ultimately come down, and have to be rebuilt.
Trump want to see himself as a great man, a sort of Napoleon being crowned, but knows that he's more like Napoleon on Elba. He's not going to get there. He's really extremely pathetic.
Also sad is the degree to which it has been demonstrated that a life of extreme wealth is corrosive. Trump's entire life of largess already showed this, but he really does believe that the White House needs a huge overblown rushed ballroom as he's seen those of failed monarchies in Europe. The republics, or in one case dictatorship, that inherited that stuff still uses it as it's a human instinct not to rip things down. That's why the Brandenburg Gate, which should have been blown to rubble in 1945, is still standing. Yes, it's a monument to German militarism, but it's big and already there so we keep it around. That's the reason the Eiffel Tower is there, even though its a giant ugly radio tower, or why the "egg beater" thing in Casper Wyoming is still there. We just can't bring ourselves to rip things down, no matter hideos they are, or how symbolically problematic.
This will come down.
It'll come down in part as it just won't work with an 18th Century large house built on a budget. It wasn't constructed to be a palace, but just a big house.
Which brings me to my next point.
Perhaps the West Wing, after actually going through the proper process, ought to be taken out as well.
No attachments to the structure are really consistent with its original concept. It isn't supposed to have a lot of offices and the entire concept of the First Lady needing room for anything is absurd. The First Lady is simply the President's wife, or Trump's case in regard to the monarchical role to which he aspires, the current concubine, or in the American Civil Religion context, his current wife.
Maybe it ought to be just scaled back to its original footprint.
Some would object that that would mean that it wouldn't have enough room for its purpose Well, No. 10 Downing Street has less room than the White House. And if more space is really needed, they can find it somewhere else in Washington D.C. Nixon actually did that with the nearby Eisenhower Building.
The drift towards an imperial presidency started with Theodore Roosevelt, who is a person I admire, but whom I admire more than I once did. TR, like Trump, tended to act unilaterally, the difference being that Roosevelt was a profoundly intelligent and moral man, where as the opposite is true of Trump. The East Wing started off in his administration as the fairly modest East Terrace, which looked nice and wasn't an overblown Sun King structure like the proposed ballroom will be, but it nonetheless got the modification trend rolling.
It would be TR's cousin Franklin that really got the modern Presidency established, however, and that due to the emergency of the Great Depression and World War Two. Franklin Roosevelt did not rule as a dictator, although people liked to accuse him of that at the time. Ironically, a President that the Republicans hate to this very day is the one, in some ways, that Trump has tried to emulate, even to the extent of wishing for a third term, which he cannot legally occupy. Franklin, of course, redid the East Wing, which was done in part due to the bomb shelter that was constructed underneath it.
The West Wing also dates back to TR's time in the White House with the construction of what was supposed to be a temporary structure. That structure was expanded in 1909 and ultimately came to be the White House office space. I don't doubt that they need office space, but as noted, maybe it can just be somewhere else.
And in fact, for the most part, it should be.
