Longtime Donald Trump critic Rick Wilson launched a furious fusillade at the president for adding to his destruction of political norms the actual destruction of the White House as he goes about building his, as Wilson put it, “vile big-box Barbie Dream House ballroom so Trump can pack more in more paying sycophants per square foot.”
Waxing poetic over the East Wing, which holds so much historical significance for generations, Wilson wrote on his Substack platform, “The East Wing, under Melania Trump, became a mood board for grievance. The holiday corridors turned into a fever dream of performative menace, a pomo aesthetic that screamed more threat than holiday spirit,” before calling what is going on an, “... American malaise dressed up as blaring pageant: a stripper-pole segment added to a ballet, a spiritual emptiness that comes when a man confuses himself with a country and then tries to decorate the void in more and more gold leaf and Temu-grade gradeau.”
At the center of it all, he claimed there can be no greater example of the president's ”rot and corruption” as he tries to make Washington D.C. over in his own "grotesque" image.
“There was, and still is, something transcendent about the White House, something balanced and quiet and stately. These are things Trump cannot abide. His vulgarity and transgression are a message that dignity and duty are for suckers; ego, payoffs, gilt ornaments and gaudy filigree are the sacrament,” he explained, adding, “This destruction, like all his other acts, is the pure, sole, personal responsibility of Donald John Trump, America’s most vile and vulgar president.”
Adding to the chorus of critics who are appalled by the destruction of a White House, which is not Trump’s to tamper with, Wilson expanded upon that and wrote, “Trump’s desecrations go far beyond today, both subtle and loud. Subtle in the way any rot is: the corruption, the cruelty, the menace are a slow corrosion; you don’t notice the termites until the balustrade gives way.”
“Rick Wilson, the ad guy in me, will tell you optics matter because they encode values. Rick Wilson, the citizen, will tell you that destroying the East Wing signals something more dangerous than bad taste and vulgar transgression: a willingness to privatize the public sacred,” he lamented before suggesting, “The slow vandalism of norms doesn’t begin with a coup; it begins with sneer quotes around the words ‘tradition’ and ‘decorum.’ Treat the People’s House like a personal club where you can extract tribute from lobbyists and corporate titans and you prepare the country to accept government as a private franchise.”
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