White House Down
Donald Trump Attacks 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Donald Trump has always had a weakness for gilt, glitter, and excess. But even by his standards of tacky grandiosity, the razing of the White House East Wing to build himself a $300 million monument to marble and mirrors represents a new low in narcissistic architecture.
The man who gold-plated his Manhattan penthouse, who slapped his name in giant letters on buildings from Atlantic City to Azerbaijan, who turned the Oval Office into a gaudy shrine of presidential portraits and golden flourishes, is now literally demolishing American history to construct what amounts to a private party palace. And he’s doing it with the subtlety of a wrecking ball through a Fabergé egg.
It began, as Trump’s schemes so often do, with a lie wrapped in superlatives. Last July, standing before reporters with that peculiar combination of bluster and boredom he reserves for pronouncing his latest “tremendous” idea, Trump announced his ballroom plan. It would be, he assured us, respectful of the existing White…
