Donald Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House because he is a selfish monster who intends to show off his power

Donald Trump destroyed the East Wing of the White House to show how much power he has....but his selfish act is a hideous display and his sinking popularity shows up in the pitiful public opinion polls. American maga voters should NEVER have elected this evil creature. 

Why Donald Trump Tore Down the White House East Wing.
The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat.  By Adam Gopnik published in The New Yorker magazine.

Destructive demolition of the East Wing of the White House

The digust, surprise and shock that so many people registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself startling and revolting. 

On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged.

And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. 

Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation.

Indeed, the same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. 

It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. 

Like President Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it.

The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory.

All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Trumpzi administration, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants.

Many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.

Trump apologists say that earlier Presidents altered the White House, too. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George H. W. Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama put in a basketball court? What’s the fuss? And, anyway, who but élitists would object to a big ballroom that looks like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark time, confines itself to stating that it has been allowed to make a digital record of what’s being destroyed—as though that were a defense, rather than an epitaph.

This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a President who actually respected the Constitution. 

It’s a form of mismatched matching. (Maine Writer- I would call it "gaslighting".) If Trump blows up boats with unknown men aboard—well, didn’t Obama use drones against alleged terrorists? (Yes, but within a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve a chain of command and a vestige of due process.) 

If Trump posts a video featuring himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping 💩excrement on peaceful protesters—well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson swear at his aides from his seat on the john❓ What’s the fuss❓ The jabs and insults of earlier Presidents, though, however rough, stayed within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side also gets to make its case. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters one early morning—at the Lincoln Memorial—and tried to understand what drove them.

So it was with the White House. Earlier alterations were made incrementally, and only after much deliberation. When Harry Truman added a not very grand balcony to the Executive Residence, the move was controversial, but the construction was overseen by a bipartisan commission. By contrast, the new project—bankrolled by Big Tech firms and crypto moguls—is one of excess and self-advertisement. The difference between the Truman balcony and the Trump ballroom is all the difference in the world. It is a difference of process and procedure—two words so essential to the rule of law and equality, yet doomed always to seem feeble beside the orgiastic showcase of power.

That is the rhetorical fragility of liberal democracy: its reliance on rules rather than on rage. 

If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption. It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness. It is the breaking of them that is the indulgence of insecure tyrants, who feel most alive in acts of real and symbolic violence.

Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them.

Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our 👀😡eyes❗ Now, we do not only sense it. 💢We can actually see it. 

New Yorkers won't stop for terrorism - even if terrorists stop for them

God Love the New York City terrorism snobbery!

Excuse me for using America's favorite poet's syntax in the title of this blog, but the rhythm of the New York state of mind seems to fit the pentameter of Emily Dickinson's poem. Although she did not stop for death, eventually, death does stop for all of us.  But, let's not stop for terrorism, even when it could put us all in harm's way!

"Whether it is that his own cowardice pushes him to impute anxiety to others or that his own cynicism leads him to exploit it, he benefits from panicked people." (referring to Donald Trump)

New York City will not stop for terrorism

From The New Yorker- by Adam Gopnik:

New York City and New Jersey:

The bombings that took place in Chelsea and New Jersey over the weekend managed to be both frightening and, in a strange way, inspiring. They were frightening, obviously, because they reminded us that, given the realities of modern technology and its dissemination of information, we can never hope to be entirely safe against the threat of terrorism. Whether or not the suspected bomber had a direct relationship with isis or other foreign groups, or, as so often now, an indirect one, or none at all, information about how to construct bombs is now so widely available that it is impossible to build complete immunity against terrorism, certainly not in anything still resembling an open society. 

For all the ingenuity and obvious efficiency of the New York Police Department and its fellows—qualities that have made terrorism in the city since 9/11 far more infrequent than anyone might have imagined in those panicky days and months after it—there is no such thing as no risk. There will be more bombings, and there will be other bombers.

The more inspiring news is that, despite that truth, the response of the people of New York was not merely “bold” or “courageous,” or all those other words we use, sometimes obnoxiously, to congratulate ourselves.

Instead, their responses were marked by something even better: cool, plain, dull indifference. It was as if New Yorkers were, after a difficult decade, finally internalizing the numerical realities of the threat that terrorism presents and the threat it doesn’t—of what terrorism is and isn’t. (And it was also a nice illustration of Jane Jacobs’s principle that there are many advantages in having eyes on the street.)

We can never get the risk level to zero. Still, the idea—still taboo to say, still disallowed from articulation, still too shocking to be uttered, certainly on cable television’s non-stop anxiety rounds—ought to be that terrorism remains as close to that as we can hope to find in this fatal world. The risks we take getting in a car or getting married (given how often spouses murder each other) or just walking outside—not to mention the risks that we take in owning a gun—are far higher than the risk that we run from terrorism. As The Economist pointed out in a useful rundown of the statistical truths not long ago, the risk of an American being killed by terrorism in the decade after 9/11 and up to 2013 was one in fifty-six million, adding, “The chance of being the victim in 2013 of an ordinary homicide in the United States was one in 20,000. Traffic accidents are three times as lethal.” President Obama has suggested as much at times, but it’s not what people want to hear, and the wisdom of probabilities is taken to be indifference to risk.

The question becomes why we develop such a high level of fright about such a low-level probability. Why are so many still so easily panicked? One reason is that there are political movements and politicians who think to benefit from them, Donald Trump chief among them right now. Whether it is that his own cowardice pushes him to impute anxiety to others or that his own cynicism leads him to exploit it, he benefits from panicked people. The more scared people are made, the more likely they are to turn to a strongman to reassure them. It is an ancient—and always duplicitous and disappointing—formula.

But a second reason is both more insidious and more interesting. It lies in the eternal human propensity to overstate and overimagine risks and loss and underimagine and understate gains and benefits. That’s something that the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, among others, became famous for highlighting. Losses loom larger than gains. We are so “loss averse” that we often fail to compute the odds of life very well. We pay far more attention to remote dangers than to the safety of our immediate circumstances. Risk is scarier than reassurance is reassuring. One terror incident terrifies; the absence of terrorism doesn’t seem to put our minds at rest.

Bad news is always bigger than good. It always will be. That’s why terrorism will always get more time on cable TV than ongoing normalcy that surrounds it. It is not just a fact of cable television. It is a fact of the human condition, or, if you prefer, of human psychology. But it is not an irredeemable part of the human condition, or a prison that human psychology makes for us. Some wisdom helps us break out. And the encouraging thing is that, somehow, most New Yorkers have already done that. The cool on display over the weekend was not courage, really. It was just calculation, the hard-won calculation of real risks and real damage, born from an accumulated knowledge of the cost that panic and fear exact from each of us when we succumb to them. It’s the kind of sane calculation that pushes people forward to walk where they want to no matter how scared they’re supposed to be.

Tump and the evil art of "the Big Lie"

"....if Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over..."

The dangerous acceptance of the liar Donald Trump- The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik 

Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who doesn't know the difference between lies and truth. 

Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. 

The Big Lie- tell a bold like often enough and innoculate people to the truth - Trumponian pathological aversion to telling the truth (and entertainment media is buying it).

In fact, the Big Lie was fit for a time of lock step processionals, and nighttime rallies and films that featured them. 

By the time Nazism arose in Germany in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was nothing new. Rather, the J­ewish people had suffered a long history of prejudice and persecution. Although Nazis perpetuated centuries-old lies, this time those lies would have their most devastating effects. Like never before, anti-Semitism was manifested in a sweeping national policy known as "the Final Solution," which sought to eliminate Jews from the face of the Earth.

To accomplish this, Adolf Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, launched a massive campaign to convince the German people that the Jews were their enemies. Having taken over the press, they spread lies blaming Jews for all of Germany's problems, including the loss of World War I. One outrageous lie dating back to the Middle Ages claimed that Jews engaged in the ritual killings of Christian children and used their blood in the unleavened bread eaten at Passover [source: Landau].

Using Jews as the scapegoat, Hitler and his cronies orchestrated what they called "the big lie." This theory states that no matter how big the lie is (or more precisely, because it's so big), people will believe it if you repeat it enough. Everyone tells small lies, Hitler reasoned, but few have the guts to tell colossal lies because a big lie is so unlikely, people will come to accept it.

Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. OMG- It wasn’t his voice on that tape of pitiful self-promotion (as mythical John Miller). O.K., ues it was—but he never mocked the handicapped reporter, he was merely imitating an obsequious one. The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. Then the next lie, and the next. If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of “Well, guess he’s changed the rules!”

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. 

Obviously, the right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. 

Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.

There is a difference between major and minor issues, and between primary and secondary values. Many of us think that it would be terrible if the radical-revisionist reading of the Second Amendment created by the Heller decision eight years ago was kept in place in a constitutional court; many on the other side think it would be terrible if that other radical decision, Roe v. Wade, continued to be found to be compatible with the constitutional order. What we all should agree on is that the one thing worse would be to have no constitutional order left to argue about.

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate. Before those famous schoolroom lines, Pope made another observation, which was that even as you recognize that the world is a mixed-up place, you still can’t fool yourself about the difference between the acceptable and the unacceptable: “Fools! who from hence into the notion fall / That vice or virtue there is none at all,” he wrote. “Is there no black or white? / Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; / ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain.” The pain of not seeing that black is black soon enough will be ours, and the time to recognize this is now.

Wake Up America #NeverTrump

Christopher Michael Martinez - a father's anguish rips at truth

Waking up the completely preventable and totally unanticipated death of his son, Mr. Christopher Michael Martinez lashes out against the politicians and all members of the National Rifle Association who are accomplices to the crimes caused by gun violence including the murder of his son.

"Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true." 

Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker:

CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL-MARTINEZ’S FATHER GETS IT RIGHT

I don’t think I’ve ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by the video of Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a twenty-year-old son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost obligatory—but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez, almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment. And so there was something almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage to speak a painful truth: “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”


Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer in question was in the grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was also capable of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues to the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez family and ruined their lives. (The shooter, Elliot Rodger, had three semi-automatic handguns that, according to the Los Angeles Times, he’d purchased legally.) Why did Christopher Michael-Martinez die? Because the N.R.A. and the politicians they intimidate enable people to get their hands on weapons and ammunition whose only purpose is to kill other people as quickly and as lethally as possible. How do we know that they are the ‘because’ in this? Because every other modern country has suffered from the same kinds of killings, from the same kinds of sick kids, and every other country has changed its laws to stop them from happening again, and in every other country it hasn’t happened again. (Australia is the clearest case—a horrific gun massacre, new laws, no more gun massacres—but the same is true of Canada, Great Britain, you name it.)

Martinez’s brave words put me in mind of a simple point, which I failed to make in a long essay about language this week, or didn’t make strongly enough. The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the truth. Clear speech takes courage. Every time we tell the truth about a subject that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage because it almost always points plainly to responsibility. To say “torture” instead of “enhanced interrogation” is hard, because it means that someone we placed in power was a torturer. That’s a hard truth and a brutal responsibility to accept. But it’s so.

Speaking clearly also lets us examine the elements of a proposition plainly. We know that slogans masquerading as plain speech are mere rhetoric because, on a moment’s inspection, they reveal themselves to be absurd. “The best answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” reveals itself to be a lie on a single inspection: the best answer is to not let the bad guy have a gun. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” No: obviously, people with guns kill more people than people without them. Why not ban knives or cars, which can be instruments of death, too? Because these things were designed to help people do things other than kill people. “Gun control” means controlling those things whose first purpose is to help people kill other people. (I’ve written at length about farmers and hunting rifles, and of how they’re properly controlled in Canada. In any case, if guns were controlled merely as well as cars and alcohol, we’d be a long way along.) And the idea that you can be pro-life and still be pro-gun: if your primary concern is actually with the sacredness of life, then you have to stand with Richard Martinez, in memory of his son.

There, that isn’t hard, is it? The war against euphemism matters most because it forces us to look at the truth we already know. The actual consequences of the N.R.A. and the gun policy it frightens those craven politicians into sponsoring is the death of kids like Christopher Michael-Martinez. This truth may not triumph tomorrow, but the truth remains the truth. It would be nice if the President, who knows all this perfectly well, put aside his conciliatory manner and his search for consensus and just said it. Speak up, Mr. President! Speak plainly. Just say, “Last night, I heard Chris’s dad. He’s right.”