Before the orange cyclone hit town, Washington was a far more staid place.
Al Gore loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics. One dinner was devoted to the meaning of metaphor. “I l-i-i-ke metaphors,” Gore drawled to The Washington Post when he was vice president. “The more complex and arcane the better.”
What must Gore make of the unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing by Donald Trump? It’s the most remarkable metaphor we’ve ever seen in the nation’s capital. It’s not complex or arcane. It’s simple and visceral. It slams you in the face — metaphorically speaking.
“He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!'” said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. “In this case, it’s sundering history.”
A Jackie Kennedy garden was plowed over by the bulldozers. The woman with the best taste in the history of the White House was rubbished by the man with the worst taste in the history of the White House.
Many of his voters wanted to see Trump take a jackhammer to Washington, but I’m not sure they meant it this literally.
Treasury Department employees, who work opposite the razing, were warned not to share pictures of it. There must be a sense that it’s profane, as it was in 1980 when Trump smashed Bonwit Teller’s limestone friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to build Trump Tower. The friezes had little artistic merit, said a “vice president” of the Trump company, identified as “John Baron” — a fake name Trump used, he acknowledged while testifying in a lawsuit over his use of hundreds of illegal Polish immigrants for the demolition.
But Trump has so little respect for this 123-year-old symbol of American history that he didn’t check with federal planning officials or Congress before he obliterated one side of the White House.
When I visited the White House with my mom as a kid, we loved overhearing foreign tourists ooh and ahh about how relatively small and modest the house was. Its simplicity was part of its charm. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.
Trump does not do small or modest. He does big, flashy odes to self. It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.
Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.
Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain — things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high.
Trump stopped trade talks with Canada on Friday because he did not like an ad commissioned by the province of Ontario that quoted from a radio address President Ronald Reagan made that criticized tariffs.
Trump, who posts fake AI slop, called the ad “FAKE.” (Reagan’s quotes were accurate but were in a different order.) The Canadians paused it.
He can indulge any crazy impulse and nobody is able to check him.
“The Congress is adrift,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told the Times’ Carl Hulse, on overseeing Trump’s legally questionable military moves and vindictive tariffs. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”
Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.
We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate — and not the fun Halloween kind.
The New York Times