When Donald Trump decided to pursue a giant White House ballroom, the president handpicked architect James McCrery, who runs a small firm known for its work designing Catholic cathedrals. It wasn’t long, however, before trouble emerged: The more the Republican started micromanaging the endeavor and expanding the scope of the vanity project, the more the shambolic process reportedly did not sit well with McCrery.
And so, last month, Trump hired a new architect to oversee the initiative — one who presumably would be comfortable with the president’s appetite for an ever-expanding project.
It’s against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump plans to build his controversial ballroom as tall as the White House’s main mansion itself, the project’s chief architect told a federal review committee Thursday — a significant change of plans that breaks with long-standing architectural norms requiring additions to be shorter than the main building.
The same report noted that the new architect, Shalom Baranes, told the National Capital Planning Commission that as part of the White House overhaul, officials are also considering a one-story addition to the West Wing’s colonnade — a subject about which the president talked to The New York Times a day earlier.
The Republican told the newspaper that he was calling the project the “Upper West Wing.”
At this point, it’s worth pausing to take stock.
The president decided early on in his second term to pave the Rose Garden. He took a borderline unhealthy interest in interior decorating, including the addition of a cartoonish amount of gold to the Oval Office.
The president installed a flagpole that he seemed awfully excited about; he boasted about “ripping” apart the tile in the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom; he installed a mirror-and-bronze lettering at the entrance to the West Wing; and he turned the Oval Office study into a depot for “TRUMP 2028” merch, like some cheap gift shop.
Then his ambitions took a more destructive turn: The president tore down the entirety of the East Wing (despite having promised not to do that) to make room for a wildly unnecessary giant ballroom.
In September, the Republican installed what was described as a “Presidential Walk of Fame” that featured images of American presidents. Then he added tacky plaques with text written by Trump himself, which smeared some his predecessors with cheap nonsense.
He said he wanted to paint the entirety of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex, so that it would look like, in the words of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “a big white blob.” (Late last week, the president indicated that this is still a priority.) Evidently, the to-do list is still growing. If we were talking about a Trump-owned property, all of this would merely be a curiosity, but we’re not. This is the White House — which is supposed to be our house. In 1998, the late David Broder criticized Bill Clinton in a memorable way. “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” the longtime Washington Post columnist said of the Democratic president. Broder, of course, was being metaphorical about Clinton and his impact at the White House. A generation later, the incumbent Republican president is actually trashing the place. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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