I've been fortunate enough to visit the White House several times, and what strikes you first, after you’ve seen pictures of it growing up, is how small it actually is. Not small in importance, of course, but small in square footage and size.
And I’ve been to the Oval Office three times, each time an awe-inspiring experience. And, again, it's really modest. I’ve been in corporate executive offices throughout my career that dwarf it. The press briefing room is tiny and cramped. I stood behind the lectern once, and I felt like I was looking down on a small hospital waiting room.
The Blue Room, the Gold Room, the East Room, even the grand-looking foyer you've seen in 100 photographs — in person, they're intimate, almost quaint. And that’s a good thing.
That's not by accident. The White House was designed to be dignified, not imperial. It was built by a country that had just fought a war to avoid having a king, and every architectural choice since has, I think, tried to reflect that restraint. It is elegant precisely because it doesn't try too hard.
That was the White House before Donald Trump turned it into a grotesque obscenity, like his language. The Oval Office today is slathered in cheap gold appliques and trim, gilded cherubs, reminiscent of the Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, perched above the doorways. Gold eagles, gold urns, a gold-plated phony FIFA trophy, gold, gold, gold. The Oval looks like a trashy casino lobby.
Outside, along the colonnade, is the horrific "Presidential Walk of Fame," gold-framed portraits of his predecessors, with one glaring exception: instead of a portrait of Joe Biden, there's a photo of an autopen, a juvenile jab dressed up as decor.
The Rose Garden lawn is gone too, paved over into a stone patio. The whole thing is maniacally monarchical.
And most devastating is Trump’s bulldozing and demolishing of the East Wing, on a whim, to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a structure that will be larger than the White House itself, at a price tag way north of $400 million.
A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 this month that he had no authority to do this without Congress's approval, that "whether or not a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide," not a matter for a maniacal monarch to rule on.
Trump called the ruling "horrendous" and "unjust" and on Friday filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court to let construction continue while he fights the lower court’s ruling.
The irony in this move is almost unreal. The billionaire bamboozler who slapped gold all over the people's house is now asking the Supreme Court, that has its own well-documented taste for gilded favors, to bless his gilded ballroom.
This is a court that has spent the last several years reliably ruling in favor of power and money over people. It gutted Chevron deference in Loper Bright, stripping federal agencies of the ability to protect workers, consumers, and the environment from corporate harm.
It ruled that cities can criminalize homelessness rather than house people. It let corporations sue unions into the ground for the economic fallout of a strike. And just this summer, in Trump v. Slaughter, it tore up nearly 90 years of precedent so Trump could fire independent watchdogs at will, gutting the very agencies meant to stand between big business and everyone else.
Then there's the court's own borderline criminal and massively covered-up relationship with wealth. Clarence Thomas, who hates anyone whose income falls below seven figures, spent decades quietly accepting superyacht vacations, private jet flights, and real estate favors from a billionaire megadonor, only disclosing any of it after journalists caught him.
The equally repugnant Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip on a hedge fund billionaire's jet, never reported it, and later ruled in that same billionaire's favor in a case worth billions.
This is a court that has no problem at all accepting gifts from precisely the class of people whose interests it keeps supporting in screwing over everyday people like you and me.
That said, don't expect this crooked court to suddenly discover a set, and I use this common man’s term intentionally, when a gold-obsessed, billionaire authoritarian leader asks permission to turn the modest White House into a monarch’s castle. If you take the court's recent history at face value, this should be an open-and-shut case for the side of extravagance.
Here's my prediction about what’s ahead for Trump’s ridiculous ballroom obsession, and it cuts two ways, both bad.
If the Court rules for Trump, expect the same disaster we've already seen with his other pet projects, which have been rushed, corner-cutting, done on the cheap with scant oversight.
The ballroom will follow the same botched work of the Reflecting Pool, helipad, Kennedy Center. It will be openly mocked and critiqued, just like the New York Times found with the ballroom being an architectural mess. It will be a never-ending money pit.
And speaking of pits. If the court rules against him, don't expect him to spend a dime of his own money finishing it properly or repairing what he tore down. He'll walk away, leaving a giant construction pit on the White House lawn, and let the next president clean up his mess, which is another pattern for Trump. When he messes up, someone else is left to clean up.
Either way, the ballroom will stand as a perfect monument to this dilapidated presidency, gaudy without taste, power, restraint, decorum, deference. It will stand as a total disregard for a national treasure that was never, ever his to remake in his own image. And a Supreme Court that has spent years proving whose side it's really on will have one more chance to prove it again.
