By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Approaching the one year mark, opposition to Donald Trump takes three forms. The first remains stuck in the past, calling Trump an aberration. Kamala Harris herself is the best example of that mindset.
Then come those who copy Trump’s playbook, concocting a new and progressive brew of joy, hatred, and magical group-think; the Mamdani crowd in New York City is the mirror image of every Trump rally. Then, finally, come those groping towards a new and more realistic politics, even if their beliefs are more expedient than sincere. But brave battles can be fought for the sake of self preservation, and Gavin Newsom in California and Seth Moulton in Massachusetts both stand out in the Democratic caucus for seeing Trump as the symptom of things gone wrong, rather than as the root of our woes.
Where all three converge, however, is a dangerous fixation on Trump himself. Those no-king rallies go in circles for a reason. Meanwhile Trump himself goes merrily along. With people complaining of his monarchical tendencies, he is tearing down the eastern tract of the White House complex to build a ballroom in its stead.
Building a ballroom did not make anyone’s top-ten action list for this or any other administration; the White House has apparently managed without one for over two centuries. But that lack has apparently been a source of diplomatic ire for about as long. In the past, we’ve set up outdoor tents for our big diplomatic affairs. Soon we can have them indoors instead. Our guests can keep their spats clean.
I am not sure why Trump cared so much, but the scratching of this particular itch has come at the cost of the first lady’s office space, the White House movie theater (where Bill Clinton once raised his sneaker-clad feet to watch the Super Bowl – the pictures are grim), and other similar amenities. One can also assume this new place will be covered with gilt. It’s being designed to look like Mar-a-Lago, our man’s personal Florida resort, famous for when he takes over as disc jockey and plays disco songs for his guests. The elite of Washington can consider themselves warned.
His defenders remind us that other presidents have altered the White House too. Truman inherited a fire trap from Roosevelt and had the whole place gutted. Kennedy’s wife decided to make her family’s home into a living museum, rendering the days when Eleanor Roosevelt could make scrambled eggs for her husband at midnight into a permanent thing of the past. Nixon added a bowling alley. Presidents are allowed to make their mark, in other words, and nobody could have doubted Trump’s need to join in. Too bad he did so in such a clumsy fashion.
I wonder if any of the people who stormed the Capitol in 2021 will ever be welcomed into his ballroom. I can see him inviting a few, just to make a point, and I hope he does. Some had never been inside a building as nice as the Capitol before. They wandered around with eyes wide open and faces betraying astonishment.
Our country used to provide itself with many beautiful public spaces. Just as the Victorians filled Britain with vaulted train stations, soaring museums, and handsome government buildings, Americans likewise conducted their public business against grand backdrops of Tennessee marble and hard New Hampshire granite. Poverty is less grinding when alleviated by respect, and good public architecture is respect in action.
But decades worth of misguided policies based on fashionable notions of tolerance led to our public spaces being ceded to the ill and the sad in city after American city. Boston’s parks, New York’s college campuses, San Francisco’s entire downtown, all have been brought low. Beauty and grace have turned inwards across our land and left the public sphere to the utilitarian at best, the degraded at worst, and the plain old forgotten in the middle.
You can now pay your taxes, send your mail, get yourself arrested and see a judge, do all your shopping for food and clothing and furniture, and generally live your entire life without ever once stumbling across a place designed for public function that actually uplifts your American soul. Those things are now only available for a price, and people shell out handsomely for them.
Trump has seen that poverty and he has done more than build a ballroom. He has also sent the military into our cities, ostensibly to make them safe. That’s what he does: he sees real neglect and he bungles the response. I hope more Democrats get involved in building things. Because if they don’t, we’ll be dancing to Trump’s tune for a very long time.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.