After Donald Trump’s destruction of the White House’s East Wing sparked considerable controversy, there was some discussion in political circles about whether regular folks would care. Sure, this mattered to those who are paying attention to current events, but was the story resonating with those who are less interested in day-to-day news?
Some anecdotal evidence suggested the answer was “yes.” A week ago, for example, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she’d heard concerns from her constituents in Alaska, who asked her, “When did we decide that we needed a bigger ballroom?” (Alaska, you may recall, is roughly 4,000 miles from Washington, D.C., an indication that this was not simply an inside-the-beltway issue.)
To the anecdotes we can now add a quantitative dimension. The Washington Post reported:
Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom building by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Thursday.
The national survey found 56% of Americans expressed opposition to the project, while only 28% said they support it. The results were very much in line with the results of the latest Economist-YouGov poll, which found 61% opposition to 25% support.
Not surprisingly, there are partisan gaps in the data — Republican voters are more likely to back Trump’s gambit than Democratic and independent voters — but when the overall picture shows 2-to-1 opposition, it’s fair to say that the American mainstream is not on board with the White House’s plan.
As for why the public is balking, there are a variety of competing explanations, but CNN’s Aaron Blake dug into the data and noticed that Americans expressed even more opposition to Trump’s ballroom than to the president’s decision to demolish the East Wing, despite the crushing images of the unnecessary destruction.
“What that might suggest: People don’t really like the idea of building an elaborate new $300 million ballroom — privately funded, Trump says — on the White House grounds during a time of significant economic hardship and inflation,” Blake added.
It’s an important point. Despite the president’s boasts about his role in creating an American utopia, there are plenty of reasons the American mainstream isn’t satisfied with the nation’s direction. Indeed, the broader circumstances are practically ridiculous: As families confront rising inflation, health care sticker shock, the expiration of SNAP benefits and the slowest U.S. job growth since the Great Recession, the president decided it’d be a great idea to pursue a massive and expensive vanity project, which will sit empty for most of the year and will only be used occasionally by the hyperelite.
“The optics,” Murkowski said last week, “are bad.” And yet the project is moving forward, as evidenced by Trump’s decision this week to fire every member of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that’s supposed to review the ballroom construction project. The panel’s members will be replaced by presidential allies, who will no doubt be expected to rubber-stamp the Republican’s decisions. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are expanding their probes into the endeavor. The Washington Post reported that Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California and several of his colleagues are “pressing the White House and outside companies to explain the project’s finances and what was promised to contributors.” (One such company is Comcast, MSNBC’s corporate parent for the next couple of months.) Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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