Metaphor is dead as Trump ‘renovates’

It appears U.S. President Donald Trump will not stop until he has rendered literally every metaphorical description one could give for his presidency.

Case in point: he’s tearing the White House apart.

Trump, as part of a lifelong effort to make everything about himself, has torn down the entire East Wing of the presidential building as he moves ahead with construction of an ornate, US$350-million ballroom. The demolition was carried out without the approvals that are normally required. He already had the Rose Garden paved over, he evidently needs more change than that.

One could have made the argument during his first term that Trump had already rewritten American politics in his image, an image which persisted through others even during his four-year absence from the Oval Office during former president Joe Biden’s term. Republican policy revolves around his whims. Democrats were, and still are, defined by how hard they will work to oppose him. When he leaves the office one day, his spectre will likely endure, hovering over the American body politic for a generation.

But that is evidently not good enough for Trump, who, in addition to feeling compelled to build a ballroom so large it will dwarf the actual White House, must also physically destroy a piece of his country’s history in order to facilitate it.

What he has not destroyed, he has rendered gaudy in his unmistakable style. During his second term he has festooned the Oval Office with ostentatious golden decorations.

And soon to come: a massive, ceremonial arch, which he has proposed to erect on a roundabout adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia — which Trump stated explicitly is to be built in honour of himself.

Organizations concerned with historic preservation are rightly alarmed, but the damage is already done. That piece of the White House is gone. Perhaps its furniture and other sundries could be reinstalled in a rebuilt East Wing, but it would still be a new wing. And it would still, assuming all goes forward as intended, sit in the shadow of Trump’s self-aggrandizing ballroom.

Trump’s renovations are not popular with the majority of Americans: according to a recent YouGov America poll, 53 per cent are against the ballroom project. Only 24 per cent approved, with the remainder uncertain.

So the question is: if most Americans do not want this, the project hasn’t been granted proper approvals and experts are tugging their collars over fears of destroyed and compromised historical buildings, why hasn’t anyone stopped him?

Last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies were loathed by Trump, who asserted he is not a king. The practical reality is that he has become one, by virtue of the checks and balances around him no longer being applied. The Republicans are in his thrall. Much of the Democratic opposition is milquetoast in its opposition to him, or so overwhelmed by his government’s many absurd exercises of power that it can’t keep up.

Trump is not all-powerful on paper, but if he opts to do whatever he likes and no one stands in his way, then he is as much a king as protesters across the U.S. last weekend fear he aspires to be.

If something doesn’t change to provide Trump and his loyalists with meaningful pushback, the destruction will only continue until Trump one day leaves behind an America forever changed for the worse and a White House rendered unrecognizable — coated in gold, with his name emblazoned across it in all capital letters.

Just like the coasters in the Oval Office.