For anyone in doubt, I can report that the White House is still standing. To be precise, the original mansion, completed in 1800, the final year of John Adams’s presidency, remains where it always has been (with its interior installed by President Harry Truman between 1949 and 1951).
The East Wing added by President Theodore Roosevelt and reconstructed by his fifth cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is, however, gone. President Donald Trump demolished it to make way for a big ballroom.
Dramatic photographs on Oct. 21 showed excavators ripping masonry down. So I went to the iron-railing perimeter to see what I could see. The answer is, not much. There’s nothing left of the East Wing above the level of the surrounding barriers. One sees only the high-hinged arms of excavators working like the elbows of a giant insect over the razed remains of its prey.
Trump’s detractors are howling. A typical condemnation came from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who posted that the president was “literally destroying the White House … just like he’s ripping apart the Constitution.”
The visual impact is a gift of a metaphor to the Left. But as has been plentifully documented elsewhere, presidents have built and rebuilt the executive mansion in its two-plus centuries, and it can properly be regarded as a never-ending work in progress.
Trump also never quite revealed the great extent of the demolition until it began. In this, he acted less like the extraordinarily skillful communicator he is and more like the wily real estate developer he used to be, pulling down the old building so fast it was immediately too late to complain.
The bottom line is, however, that the ballroom will be built, it is a necessary addition, it is designed by a highly reputable and talented firm of architects, and it will be used frequently, if not gratefully, by every future president until it, too, needs to make way for something new generations from now.
Trump’s critics never pass up an opportunity to suggest that his latest move, whatever it is, is a damnable horror. But in doing so, they show their economic innumeracy. They should learn, perhaps from the boy who cried wolf, that repeated cries of ersatz alarm eventually reduce the value of the next one to zero. If there is oversupply, the share price collapses. Perhaps we should call the hyperinflated market for Trump scare stories the South Lawn Bubble.
THERE’S LEFT AND FURTHER LEFT, AND THEN THERE’S MAMDANI
Democrats and their ilk are skillful and sophisticated at stoking outrage. They can get the chattering classes to spout the latest approved leftist line instantaneously like a vast chorus, no matter how silly it is. But they seem not to realize that most people just think, they’re at it again, and tune them out. If everything is appalling, nothing is.
The discount that now applies to leftist complaints about the White House occupant’s actions was demonstrated by tourists walking across Lafayette Park to look at the demolition work. They wore no MAGA paraphernalia, nor any other sign of strident political allegiance. But as they approached the North Lawn where a fountain splashed in the sparkling sunshine, one of them raised a laugh by remarking, “I think the fountain water is liberal tears.”
