A Tiny Man Plays with His Tiny Toys

The desecration continues because the Republicans allow it

“I like the largest.” Moron.

Yesterday, Donald did something shocking. It wasn’t that he said he wasn’t going to do something and then ended up doing it. He lies about almost everything at almost all times. The shocking thing wasn’t that he did it—we should know by now that he is capable of the worst atrocities. It is what he did that should shock us. Yesterday, slightly after 5:00 p.m. ET photos and videos started circulating of the facade of the East Wing of the White House being demolished. It turns out that this was part of the plan for the construction of Donald’s $250 million, 90,000 square foot ballroom; this despite Donald’s assurances that the new structure wouldn’t have any impact on the White House at all.

He literally said:

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. It’s my favorite.

The proposed ballroom will dwarf the White House residence. Expected to have a capacity of 1,000, there will be just enough room to fit the most obscenely wealthy members of our society and will benefit exactly nobody. Donald claims, without any evidence, that funding for this project is provided by private donors, including him, which means that that is almost certainly not true.

Right now, we are in the middle of a government shutdown. A significant majority of civil servants have been furloughed, which is to say not only are they not working, but they’re also not getting paid. Other members of the civil service, including those in the military, have to show up to work and many of them also aren’t getting paid. Air-traffic controllers, considered essential workers, understandably, are getting paid at a reduced rate, but not for long.

Thank goodness, though, there’s $250 million kicking around for Donald to build yet another monument to his pathetic ego. Donald is a civil servant only in the most technical sense of the term, but he is a civil servant who lives in public housing. We pay for that housing and he lives in our house, the People’s House. He has no right at all to do what he did. This is an act of vandalism, and it should be punished accordingly. But the feckless Republicans will look the other way no matter how disgusted they might be--privately.

Earlier today, Donald commented on this act of destruction in the parking lot that used to be the Rose Garden:

This has been a labor of love. We took over a building that was not properly taken care of. It just wasn’t. It’s a very special building and we are taking care of it. This was grass, and when you have a news conference, and this was going on for many years, but everybody would just sink into the mud. It was extremely luxurious grass, especially when it was raining because you’d go down about five inches into the mud, and when we had a press conference here, all the press standing back there, they’d be cursing me. The women would be lifting up their shoes, ‘You’ve destroyed my shoes. This is terrible.’”

I am so, so bloody tired of this man and his inanities. While it’s true that people blame Donald for a lot of things, the grass in the Rose Garden is not one of them. Donald Trump is a destructive being. He has never created anything good because he is incapable of doing so. Therefore, he tears things down. He claims falsely that the White House was not properly taken care of. I’ve been in the White House and it is impeccably maintained. To say otherwise is to insult the people who expend such great effort to care for it. It is a beautiful, beautiful building. Since the East Wing houses Melania’s offices (why she needs them is beyond me), I can only assume that she demanded an upgrade.

Yesterday, just as the images of the defacement of the East Wing started circulating, Donald took to his failing social media site to comment on the situation:

In part, I am pleased to announce that ground has been broken on the White House grounds to build the new big, beautiful White House ballroom. I’m honored to be the first [grifter] to finally get this much needed project underway with zero cost to the American taxpayer. The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous patriots, great American companies, and yours truly.

If you believe that Donald Trump is putting a dime of the money he has grifted off the American taxpayer into that project, you are as delusional as he is. It’s very possible that some of the same people who donated to the inauguration, the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs of the world, are contributing to this horrific project, blood money and all. But my bet is that the American people are footing the bill. Let’s put this in context again—not only are many civil servants out of work and not getting paid right now, many of them won’t have jobs to come back to because the Trump regime is hell-bent on decimating the civil service. Also, Donald’s deeply misguided tariff policy is bankrupting American farmers.

Unemployment is rising, inflation is rising, prices are rising. That ballroom, I have no doubt, will be as hideous as he has made the Oval Office, but there’s no accounting for taste. The question is: How many people will ever see the inside of that room? What is it for, other than to prop up this tiny man?

Donald has taken so many bribes and engaged in countless acts of money laundering over the decades that we should put nothing past him. We need to ask who’s donating to this project, especially since we know Donald is perfectly willing to take gifts for favors, the most recent instances of which are the $400 million 747 gifted to him—not the American people—by Qatar (for which he is using over a billion dollars of Pentagon funds to upgrade and refurbish).

The Washington Post reports that the ballroom construction has gotten millions of dollars from tech, crypto, and defense corporations, including Coinbase, Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir. At a dinner at the White House on October 15th, Donald celebrated donors such as Blackstone, Steven Schwartzman, and the Winklevoss twins. He made a point of mentioning that some gifts were as high as $25 million.

I wonder if those multi-millionaires and billionaires have any money left over to contribute to USAID. I know the work of that now-dismantled agency isn’t nearly as important as building a gilded ballroom, but maybe they could be bothered to donate some money so children don’t starve or die of easily preventable diseases.

The project has already raised more money than it will cost to build it, so Donald has floated the idea of using the excess funds to build a grand arch near Arlington Memorial Bridge, allegedly for this country’s 250th birthday. But he’s already referring to the arch as the Arc de Trump, which fills me with so much shame I would like to crawl into a very deep, dark hole. Worse, Donald has made it very clear the purpose of this arch is to honor him. According to the BBC, he said “there were three versions of the arch - small, medium and large - but that he liked the largest one the best.”

Demolishing a wing of the White House, a house he does not own and that he has no right to touch, may have crossed a line, at least with some people, because it appears that many Americans—even his followers—are, quite frankly, horrified by the photos and videos of this historic building being reduced to rubble by a bulldozer.

Newsweek reports, that Aceco LLC, the contractor that took on this demolition job, has been receiving a trove of negative reviews on its website. Newsweek also adds that:

changes to the White House building must be vetted by the National Capitol Planning Commission Board. But the head of the panel that [Donald] appointed said last night that the demolition work fell outside the board’s jurisdiction, giving the green light for it to proceed without their approval.

In other words, he lied, just like Donald has been lying to all of us. The Trump regime is trying to contain the damage, but they’re failing. In fact, according to a CNBC report, the Treasury Department told staff not to share photos of the White House’s East Wing demolition.

They planned to do this under cover of darkness so that we wouldn’t know what was really going on. Once again, this toddler tyrant gets his way without having to face public accountability. The White House is our house. Nobody has the right to touch it without our permission, and if somebody does so, they deserve to be held accountable for it. But accountability and Donald go together like oil and water. So, let’s not hold our breath, shall we? On the other hand, we can’t let this go. Let’s protest this act of desecration every single day it continues. And let’s make sure that no one who is misguided or craven or stupid enough to accept an invitation to that ballroom ever enjoys it.