\u201cHe\u2019s saying, \u2018I can do whatever the hell I want and you can\u2019t stop me!\u2019\u201d said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. \u201cIn this case, it\u2019s sundering history.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/CIFXFCGKZGOLCML7M65MRFOB2I.jpg\")
A 1906 photo from the Library of Congress of the East Entrance, as it was then known, of the White House. From the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has taken an ends-justify-the-means attitude toward his presidency. Photograph: Al Drago\/The New York Times <\/p>\n
A Jackie Kennedy garden was ploughed 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.<\/p>\n
Many of his voters wanted to see Trump take a jackhammer to Washington, but I\u2019m not sure they meant it this literally.<\/p>\n
Melania probably doesn\u2019t care. As The Times\u2019s Katie Rogers reported in her book about first ladies, American Woman, Melania only dropped by the East Wing, which held the offices for the first lady and her staff, a couple of times in the first term. She hasn\u2019t been around much this term either.<\/p>\n
Treasury department employees, who work opposite the razing, were warned not to share pictures of it. There must be a sense that it\u2019s profane, as it was in 1980 when Trump smashed Bonwit Teller\u2019s limestone friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to build Trump Tower. The friezes had little artistic merit, said a \u201cvice president\u201d of the Trump company, identified as \u201cJohn Baron\u201d \u2013 a fake name Trump used, he acknowledged while testifying in a lawsuit over his use of hundreds of illegal Polish immigrants for the demolition.<\/p>\n
But Trump has so little respect for this 123-year-old symbol of American history that he didn\u2019t check with federal planning officials or Congress before he obliterated one side of the White House. As if he\u2019s tearing down a gas station.<\/p>\n
![\"President](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761508695_475_LEWOWOBYI3YXK53SRQDUOX5RSY.jpg\")
President Donald Trump holds a rendering of the new White House ballroom as meets with Nato’s Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on October 22nd. Photograph: Doug Mills\/The New York Times<\/p>\n
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. We didn\u2019t have the grand castles of the European nobility we were trying to shed. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.<\/p>\n
Trump does not do small or modest. He does big, flashy odes to self. The joke when Trump was first running was that he\u2019d slap his name on the White House facade as he did with all his other properties. And now it\u2019s happening. White House officials are saying Trump will name the ballroom after himself.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s another example, as Rahm Emanuel says, that Trump wants to rule, not govern.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe believes that the only thing you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest,\u201d Axelrod said.<\/p>\n
The president has the kind of blot-out-the-sun narcissism that spurs him to do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on him. He ignores the law, procedures, consequences.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Keith Duggan: As diggers tear into the White House, Trump is reminded: ‘It’s not yours’Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n It\u2019s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.<\/p>\n Build a $300 million, 90,000sq ft gilt ballroom \u2013 which will overshadow the central edifice \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, okay?\u201d he said on Thursday. \u201cWe\u2019re going to kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s talent is finding wormholes in the system he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain \u2013 things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a low-life could rise so high.<\/p>\n Bloomberg\u2019s Tim O\u2019Brien wrote that in seeking private funding for the ballroom, Trump may encourage influence-peddling \u2013 grifting-off the presidency even more.<\/p>\n After turning the justice department into his own vigilante posse, Trump now wants to warp the once-esteemed department even more. He has made a cockamamie demand that the department give him $230 million as compensation for previous federal investigations of him. The New York Times editorial board called it \u201ca breathtaking act of self-dealing\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump once thought nothing of aiming to overthrow the government he ran. Now he thinks nothing of threatening to sue the government he runs if he isn\u2019t allowed to pay himself a quarter of a billion dollars.<\/p>\n \u201cWe the People\u201d is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.<\/p>\n 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 criticised tariffs.<\/p>\n Trump, who posts fake AI slop, called the ad \u201cFAKE\u201d. (Reagan\u2019s quotes were accurate but were in a different order.) The Canadians paused it.<\/p>\n It was like when Trump levied a 50 per cent unilateral tariff on Brazil because it had the temerity to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro, who also tried to steal an election when he was president. Or when Trump mused about bailing out his right-wing ally in Argentina, potentially to the tune of $40 billion, and promised to quadruple the amount of Argentinian beef allowed into this country at a lower tariff rate \u2013 infuriating strugg\u2013ing American ranchers.<\/p>\n