Last month, Donald Trump explained away his hoarse voice by saying he “blew his stack” shouting at stupid people. He must have been looking at himself in the mirror — and if he was, there’s no doubt that mirror cracked.
Not only because of Trump’s shrillness, but because of the reflection that poor mirror was forced to provide. His slipping visage and voice are at once offensive and burdensome, and both appear to be creeping into a presbyphonic (shorter version, “old”) and crass articulation.
It’s emblematic of how Trump brings everything down around him. Everything Trump faces, and speaks about, ends up in disarray, decay, and disillusionment — including tariffs, affordability, immigration policy, and health care. Even the Kennedy Center, which is losing money, its reputation, and the talent it hosts, is having its name besmirched, cracking apart its foundation.
That majestic building on the Potomac, which glimmers, sings, and dances at night, now has an ominous pall that reflects the darkness and destruction of Trump.
Across the river, what will Trump tear down to build his abominable “Trump’s Arch?” It's modeled on Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It would be a colossal blight on the Potomac, designed less to honor the republic than to glorify Trump through some sort of warped military pageantry.
And perhaps most obviously, how Trump brought down the East Wing of the White House. A wrecking ball smashing history, having already obliterated Jackie Kennedy’s garden, to build his vulgar ballroom. Trump’s obsession with the most glamorous first couple in history is stupefying.
Having already fired the first architect of his monstrous imperial symbol, Trump will most assuredly find a way to seize for himself supposed private funds toward the construction. That means it will be done on the cheap, cracking apart at the first sign of a summer storm.
Trump’s demolition derby marches on.
On the West Wing colonnade this week, he unveiled what he calls “presidential plaques,” bronze declarations masquerading as history, heavy with lies, distortions, and mockery of his predecessors. They are not commemorations; they are accusations, bolted into place, bringing down any semblance of decency and decorum the Colonnade demands, and Trump defaces.
Inside the Oval Office, the walls groan under gold. Gold moldings, gold flourishes, frames, gold gifts, gold clocks, gold trophies, a gold fake peace prize, everywhere, ornament layered upon ornament layered until there is no white space left to breathe.
The room no longer signals restraint or a republic’s modesty. Now, it signals repulsive regalness. The walls of the revered, most storied office in the world, sagging under the heaviness of the ogreish Trump.
The White House is shaking under the weight.
This is not just about aesthetics or temperament. It is about what happens when a country’s symbolic center is subjected to the same forces as its politics: overload, distortion, anger, retribution, ego, usurpation, commandeering, and intimidation. Walls are meant to hold. Space is meant to clarify. Plaques are meant to tell the truth. When they do the opposite, when they strain under falsehoods, when they exist to erase rather than remember, the structure weakens.
Then comes the raging screams of Trump’s address to the nation this week. It was not merely aggrieved; it was violent in tone. Not violent in the sense of physical action, but in the way a feeble old man tries to cling to a truth that no longer exists. It was the sound of pressure without release, of a desperate attempt to justify power. It was a disgrace.
The unabated noise of lashing out was, metaphorically, cracking the walls in the place where he gave the speech, the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, the already strained walls holding a seemingly unbearable clutter of Christmas branches and decorations.
History offers warnings about leaders who scream at nations, collapse historic venues, and build monuments to themselves.
Adolf Hitler famously fulminated and roared at the German people, turning volume into insipid authority and fury into authoritarian inevitability. He, too, dreamed of tearing down walls, of demolishing the existing city to make room for a monumental new capital, “Germania,” a world city scaled to fantasy and domination.
Vast swaths of Berlin were marked for destruction to clear space for colossal buildings designed to awe and dwarf the individual. In the end, very little was built. The screaming came first, the ruins came later.
This is not to say America is Germany in the 1930s. History does not repeat so neatly. But it does rhyme, especially when leaders substitute shouting for persuasion and monument-building for legitimacy. When power fixates on grandiosity and extravagance, it is often compensating for instability, and in this case massive insecurity, beneath the surface.
Trump’s White House tells that story in physical form. Gold layered until it crumples. Plaques hung until they bend under the weight of untruth. Cranes, excavators, and bulldozers, trashing history. And a voice, strained, cracking, and blowing its stack, demanding that the country follow under its weight.
As a nation, we are being commanded to live inside Trump’s decibel-breaking noise, with no pause for introspection, and no room for facts that do not flatter Trump’s power. Institutions are now more like set pieces of a horror film, history like aluminum, easily disposed of.
Buildings, like democracies, can bear only so much ornament before the structure begins to fail. They can endure only so much added weight before stress fractures appear. The same is true of a country asked to carry lies as if they were foundational facts. When that foundation tremors and the walls start trembling, the fault lies with what was piled upon them.
