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. 

Morning in America Eclipse: Travel Alert to the United States - Gun Violence Targets the American Dream

As an American citizen of the world, I'm deeply sorry for the thousands of preventable gun violence death of all people. 

This preventable slaughter is darkening the American dream and eclipsing the metaphor "Morning in America".

Exactly where is Ronald Reagan's Morning in America?  

Instead of idealism, we're killing ourselves with guns in record numbers. Now, the preventable violence has made an international embarrassment out of the American Dream.

"..our country is prouder and stronger and better..," President Reagan said in his now nostalgic 1984 "Morning in America" campaign ad.  

Of course, President Reagan was tragically the victim of gun violence.  Yet, before he died in 2004 of Alzheimer's, he spoke out against gun violence.

"I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.'' ---Ronald Reagan, at his birthday celebration in 1989.
Although a majority of Americans agree about eliminating gun violence with stronger regulations of ownership, we've been, heretofore, unsuccessful in changing our nation's gun ownership laws to prevent the slaughter of innocents. 

America's city streets, especially in Chicago, our families where domestic violence is out of control, going to school or jogging in Oklahoma, are now dangerous places to be, because of the risk of gun violence.

Once again,  we're summoned to mourning after learning of the tragic killing of the 22 year old Australian athlete, Christopher Lane, who was shot and killed, without reason, by a gang of three minors who are also thugs, on August 16th,  in Duncan, Oklahoma.
I didn't know Mr. Lane, but I'd be willing to bet he believed in the American Dream.  Now, his family in Australia is living the nightmare of knowing their son is dead.

How did a gang of three minors get access to a gun and murder an innocent young Australian rising baseball star, while he was jogging in Oklahoma?  Since when do minors have Second Amendment Rights to own guns?

This senseless evil act of violence against Lane was coupled by another (thankfully unsuccessful) attack at a school near Atlanta, Georgia, when a gunman, with an AK-47, like President Reagan spoke about, added more imagery to those of the Sandy Hook Elementary slaughter of innocents on December 16, 2012 or the Columbine Massacre of April 20, 1999..  

Well before these incidents, back on July 23, 2012, Australia's then Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer had already issued a travel advisory for his country's citizens, who were planning to visit America.

Beware gun-toting US: Fischer- issued this warning a year before Mr. Lane was murdered last Friday in Oklahoma:  

"It has reached the stage where the likelihood of being shot is 15 times greater in the US than in Australia," he said.

BY:HARRY EDWARDS
From:The Australian
July 23, 2012 12:00AM


FORMER deputy prime minister Tim Fischer issued an extraordinary warning to Australians planning to take advantage of the strong dollar and travel to the US: go at your own peril.

Mr Fischer's warning came after 12 people were killed and a further 58 wounded when a gunman fired on a crowded cinema during a screening of the latest Batman movie in the Denver, Colorado, suburb of Aurora.

"It has reached the stage where the likelihood of being shot is 15 times greater in the US than in Australia," he said.

"People should be aware of this when making a decision to travel to the US.

"If I go to the US, I will factor this in and I will be very reluctant to take my family to the USA in the foreseeable future."

Four American presidents have been victims of gun violence:

1.  Abraham Lincoln - murdered in Washington DC 1865

2.  William McKinley - murdered in Buffalo NY 1901

3.  John F. Kennedy - murdered Dallas, TX 1963

4.  Ronald Reagan - seriously wounded, nearly died except for expert trauma care, assassinated in Washington DC, in 1981.

Several other presidents, including Gerald Ford, were also targeted.

Our reputation as Americans, who were inspired by "Morning in America" is experiencing damaging sun spots. Our American Dream is becoming a nightmare, as gun violence in cities like Chicago makes living there as risky as being stationed with the US Army in the Taliban infested Afghanistan.

In my opinion, God Rest Their Souls, our four late Presidents, who were victims of gun violence, would readily join hands in a quartet of ghosts to warn us about the future of America in the wake of growing gun violence.  We're killing our young people!

Our American Dream is becoming a grizzly "Ghost of America Past" (to paraphrase Charles Dickens), as unbridled gun violence grows, causing preventable harm to thousands of promising young people, and world leaders and, now, to the bereaved family of Christopher Lane.

I'm so deeply sorry.  I'd change the gun laws if I could...but, because Americans have, heretofore, been unsuccessful in changing Second Amendment Rights, we can never bring Christopher Lane back.