Tear down the Trump Taj Mahal wing of the White House

Some free advice the aspirants to the 2028 Democratic nomination should definitely take:

I know we talked about this yesterday. And Mona has a very fine piece on it today. But I’m obsessed with Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House.

Have you ever tried to put an addition on your home? How long did the process take? You have to:

• Decide what you want to do.
• Decide on an architect to design the job.
• Go through the design process to settle on a final project.
• Bid out the project to at least three contractors.
• Go through the financing approval process.
• Go through regulatory approval for permitting.

That’s months and months of work before you hammer in a single nail. And somehow Trump is doing demo work on a project that will dwarf the White House just nine months into his term.

Is a president really allowed to do this?

This is a serious question: Is the president the owner of the White House? Can he do literally anything he wants to it? Could he knock down the whole thing and replace it with a ten-story Brutalist cube?

I guess so.

The good news is this means that the next Democratic inhabitant of the White House can demolish the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom and Casino and restore the East Wing and the rest of the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.

There is actually an important issue at stake here, one of the few things Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall agreed on: the American republic should not do royalist trappings. A lot will need to be done to counter Trump’s war on the best parts of the constitutional order, but demolishing Trumpism’s most obvious symbolic manifestation would be a good start.