The White House is not a palace for a president who acts like a king
The destruction of the People's House is a mirror of Trump's selfish desire to bulldoze our constitutional republic and replace it with his will.
By Austin Sarat and Steve Kramer
Like many Americans, we found the pictures of the demolition of the East Wing of the White House unusually unsettling and upsetting. The emotions run deep and are much more than nostalgia or attachment to a national structure that stands for freedom and democracy.
We were unsettled by the unbridled arrogance that the demolition represents. We were unsettled by the realization that President Donald Trump wants to turn the White House into a palace.
The White House is not a palace, and it should never be treated like one. Though it was once referred to as the “President’s Palace,” that label was quickly replaced by a more ordinary designation.
The White House became known as the “Executive Mansion,” a bland description that links the building to a government function, not a particular person. It is not a place to display the wealth and privilege of anyone. It is, instead, a workplace for a president and his staff, who serve a sovereign people.
If seeing is believing, what is being done to the physical structure of the White House should be enough to show all Americans what our future will look like if they do not rouse themselves and make massive No Kings Day protests a regular event.
Throughout history, kings have built palaces and monuments to display and memorialize their greatness. They wanted to live in luxury even if they had to starve their people to fund their monumental ambitions. As the apocryphal story goes, when her people did not have enough money to buy bread, an out-of-touch French queen said, “Let them eat cake.”
Kings build palaces and monuments to satisfy their narcissistic needs. Sound familiar?
A president focused on the people would not make a garish display of opulence so important.
That is why Trump’s unilateral decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House and replace it with a grandiose ballroom is so revealing. It is ironic that our president has presented more plans for his gilded ballroom than for helping end the government shutdown.
What is going on at the White House is a dramatic and visible sign of Trump’s royal ambitions and disdain for the people he leads. He insists on building on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom when the average size of a new single-family home in the United States is around 2,200 square feet.
At a time when the Trump administration and its congressional cronies are taking away health care from millions of Americans and refusing to help subsidize its cost for millions of others, the president is happy to spend $300 million to construct a place to entertain the rich and famous.
Architecture matters, and never more so than in public buildings. It matters, as the architect Andrew Mackie explained, because “it reflects culture, identity, community and connects us with our history.” What we build helps “record our past, define our present and shape our future.”
The president’s misplaced desire to turn the White House into a palace mirrors his selfish desire to bulldoze our constitutional republic and replace it with a form of government in which his will becomes the law of the land. Paul Krugman got it right when he said, “tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste…. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal.”
“For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate,” Krugman added. “The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.”
We need to prove the president wrong and affirm the vision of the patriotic leaders who agreed to build a residence for the president. They never envisioned it as a palace or a Versailles for its occupants.
The history of the White House began with the decision in 1790 to move the nation’s capital from Philadelphia to what is now Washington, D.C. Once that decision was made, George Washington enlisted the help of Pierre L’Enfant, an early version of a city planner, to help choose a site for what he referred to as a “President’s House.”
Washington never lived there. The first occupant was John Adams, the second president. In 1901, the White House began to appear on official documents.
Since then, presidents have made architectural changes to the White House. The last significant one occurred about 75 years ago. Occasional updates and structural alterations are to be expected.
But Trump is doing something very different.
As Krugman explained, the excesses of Trump’s style is “to project ‘a kind of power that bypasses all the boring checks and balances of collaboration and mutual responsibility and first-among-equals. It is about a single dominant personality.’ ... This is all deeply alien to American tradition.”
The fact that the White House is a National Heritage Site and is owned by the National Park Service has not dissuaded the president from imposing his will.
When he announced the plan, the president assured everyone that the East Wing of the White House would not be touched. Without consultation or notice, without any public process, we learned about the change in plan only when the demolition started.
As the journalist Nate Berg noted, “The White House, along with the Supreme Court building, the Capitol building, and several other properties, is exempted from historic preservation rules that would otherwise stand in the way of such a building being torn down,” but the president didn’t see fit to ask the people he serves for their input.
That is the way kings behave, not presidents in a constitutional republic.
Almost five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump promoted the desecration of the Capitol. Now, it is the White House’s turn.
It is too late to stop that, but it is not too late for everyone, including those who might get invited to the White House’s Palace of Versailles grand opening, to join efforts to stop the desecration of our democracy.
No palaces. No kings.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Steve Kramer practices law and served as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts.
Trump is a tacky, vulgar, demented and corrupt creep. He has never belonged in the WH; he should be in a padded prison cell.
Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country! What can we do? We can join a campaign or send money for Dems to campaign in red districts and red states. Convince voters why they should vote against policies that don’t serve them or their country their families or the future of the country and most certainly not democracy.