The Ballroom and the Bubbles

Chalk another one up for the hollow men

As shocking as it’s been to see the innards of the East Wing this week, there is also a refreshing honesty to it. For once, there is no obscuring the destruction required to build one of the Trump administration’s many new façades. Goodbye, East Wing; hello 999 capacity, $250 $300 million big empty room.

The metaphors write themselves, and they’re not even metaphors. Trump is destroying the White House, history, tradition, etc., to put up a new Mar-a-Lago and further enrich himself and his cronies. But more than the gaudy McMansion-ing of it all, I’m fixated on the hollowness.

We’ve discussed Trump as a president of surfaces. The gold ornamentation everywhere; the hyperfeminine and manly-man personal aesthetics; the fixation on ~rebranding~. Beneath the gilding is the hollowing. DOGE’s hollowing of the civil service; the hollowing of our records and museums; the hollowing of the Republican Party, now a shape made entirely of fringe; the hollowing of social welfare, as healthcare for millions hangs in the balance and already-squeezed programs like SNAP become shutdown collateral; the hollowing of our global standing as the short-term gains of burning our alliance bridges begin to reveal their long-term costs; the hollowing of our scientific research capabilities; the hollowing of our civil discourse amid news deserts and media capitulation. The big ol’ ballroom is the perfect monument to this. A whole lot of stale air in a shell hastily erected on the ruins of something that took much, much longer to build.

The hollowness goes on. “You hear that sound?” Trump said in the (newly paved) Rose Garden on Tuesday, referring to the East Wing demolition racket. “Oh, that’s music to my ears…it reminds me of money.” Most things do, I assume. The money for this particular construction comes from titans of tech and finance who are presently engaged in their own kinds of hollowing, aka some of the biggest market bubbles we’ve seen since the Great Recession. Crypto needs no introduction as an unstable asset, and more and more observers suspect a gargantuan AI bubble. The administration and its billionaire accomplices are driving their zeppelin engines of prosperity as far as they’ll go.

Trump says he’ll make architecture great again by mandating that it be neoclassical—which is to say, all we can have is a copy (MAGA neoclassical) of a copy (colonial era neoclassical) of the original (hail Caesar). Unless, of course, it’s a copy (White House 2.0) of a copy (Mar-a-Lago) of Versailles. The MAGA faithful, meanwhile, fight over the hollow simulacra of the old-time Golden Age they’re told will come again. So far they’re doing less mourning of the East Wing than they did of the Cracker Barrel logo: something that was only ever a pastiche of the memory of a “real” country store.

Everything about Trump is simulacrum, from his false-nostalgic sloganeering, to his AI propaganda, to his grand imperial warehouse-to-be. The exposed guts of the East Wing are what’s real. There’s a reason they didn’t want people taking pictures.

The thing about big, hollow things is that the bigger and hollower they get, the more unsound they become. The ballroom may stand (though who knows, the administration seems to be dodging all oversight) but make no mistake: the wealth and power that produced it is grossly, unstably inflated. And we know what happens to bubbles.