Notes on the camp of the fascist saints

I remember a car advertisement from way back in the day in which the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán asked the TV audience to consider the sheer luxuriousness of “rich Corinthian leather.” Is this thing on YouTube? (Ten seconds later). Of course it is:

There is needless to say no such thing as Corinthian leather in the real world, so-called. I was reminded of all that campy luxuriousness, invented by the Don Drapers of the day, when I read the opening passage of this long New York magazine essay, in which a journalist was given extensive access to the president of the United States, for the specific purpose of allowing this august personage to talk endlessly about his stupid fucking ballroom project:

“These are Corinthian columns,” President Donald Trump tells me as he sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in late August, a stack of printed renderings spread before him. The images show aspects of the ballroom he is building on the site of the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. “That’s your highest level,” he continues. “There are levels of columns: Corinthian, Doric. And to be honest with you, the White House should have used Corinthian. It’s a luxury house, a house of luxury, and they used Doric, which is not as nice. Maybe I’ll fix that, too.”

The White House exterior actually has Ionic columns, but the extent of the president’s architectural ambitions is clear enough. The ballroom is set to be a gold-adorned Roman temple of a building with 40-foot ceilings and 22,000 square feet of space, big enough to hold around a thousand guests. (The structure overall will occupy some 90,000 square feet, nearly twice the size of the main White House building.) The printouts include close-up shots of the ornate carvings — dense layers of leaves guarded by two open-mouthed lions — meant to top the building’s formidable colonnade. Trump says the ballroom shares design aspects with the Palace of Versailles but is in many ways going to be “more beautiful.”

He tells me that advancements have made concrete stronger than ever (“There’s probably no material where there’s been more progress made than good old concrete”), that he is using the best marble in the world for the ballroom’s floor (“I know more about stone than anybody imaginable”), and that the portico will have columns four rows deep (“The Supreme Court is three deep. No other building has it, and I did it because it’s incredible”). He smiles, gazing dreamily into the distance as he describes the cocktail parties and conferences that could soon be held in the ballroom, where no one will have to worry about security. “If you’re making a speech and bullets start getting aimed at the windows, all you’ll hear is ‘ping ping ping,’” he says. “I would suggest you probably stop the speech, but you actually wouldn’t have to, if you want to know the truth.”

It goes on and on like that, for many thousands of words. Trump is utterly obsessed with his stupid fucking ballroom, which needs to be imploded by demolition crews on January 20, 2029, at 12:01 PM.

How long as he been obsessing on his stupid fucking ballroom?

In the spring of 2010, David Axelrod, then the senior adviser to President Barack Obama, got a call from Trump. “I build ballrooms,” Axelrod recalls Trump telling him. “I build the greatest ballrooms in the world — come down to Florida and see for yourself. You have these state dinners, and you have them in these shitty little tents in the back. It’s not befitting. Let me build a modular ballroom for you. You can put it together, take it apart.” The idea struck Axelrod as preposterous. “We were just coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and I’m pretty sure no one in America thinks our priority should be a ballroom for the White House,” he tells me. Still, he passed on the message to the White House social secretary, believing that someone would get in touch with Trump. For whatever reason, no one called Trump back. “He was owed a call,” Axelrod says. “I have no excuse for that.”

Fifteen years later, Axelrod has occasionally wondered whether history might have gone differently had they humored him. Would a few shoulder-to-shoulder photographs at a groundbreaking ceremony have been enough to prevent Trump from spearheading the birther movement and descending the golden escalator in 2015? Axelrod thinks not, but there is one counterfactual he entertains: “If we had let him build his modular ballroom, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to demolish the East Wing. And in that sense, I kind of regret not doing it.”

“He was owed a call.” David Axelrod everybody!

Just as Trump so often comes across as a racist’s parody of a black man — lazy, stupid, hyper-sexualized — he also manifests as a misogynist’s parody of a woman, spending two hours a day on his hair, while fixating on picking out the perfect backsplash for the new designer kitchen while the world burns:

In November, Trump stood at a lectern in the East Room of the White House in front of an audience of foster parents and children. He was meant to speak about an executive order to address the broken foster-care system. But first he gave a site briefing. “Right behind me, by the way, in about two years from now, we’ll use a much bigger room because we had to turn away a lot of people, and it’ll be right here,” he said, pointing to a wall of the recently demolished East Wing. “This will be the entrance. That’s a knockout panel — it’s called a knockout. It looks pretty nice right now, but it’s going to look a lot better in a little while. And we’re going to go from this room into a room that seats a few more people and it’s going to be beautiful. They’ve wanted it for 150 years and they’re getting it and they’re getting the best. It’ll be the best anywhere in the world.” Without so much as a pause, he continued, “Each year, more than 15,000 young people age out of the foster-care system. And unfortunately, too many struggle to become self-sufficient.”

This is one of the stranger features of Trump’s second term: No matter the subject (child-rearing, public policy, baseball, death) or the audience (billionaire businessmen, Cabinet secretaries, children who have faced housing insecurity), he’s probably going to bring up the ballroom. In September 2025, a day after the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Trump was asked outside the White House how he was coping. “I think very good,” he said before pointing to a herd of nearby construction vehicles and saying, “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They’ve just started construction of the new ballroom.”

He talked about the ballroom when announcing the federal takeover of D.C. police (“I’ve never seen a crowd like this,” he said to the press in the White House briefing room. “I think we need a ballroom — and that’s happening”) and at a meeting with oil-and-gas executives to discuss the situation in Venezuela (“We’re ahead of schedule on the ballroom and under budget!”). In March, during a Medal of Honor ceremony, he noted that the First Lady didn’t like all the noise from the construction site. “She says, ‘Will the pile drivers ever stop?’” he said. “You know they go from six in the morning until 11:30 in the evening. Can you imagine?” Just two hours after a wannabe assassin shut down the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Trump gave a press conference arguing that the attempt on his life was proof the ballroom needed to be built for his safety.

In late August, I attended a Rose Garden event about school choice, where he regaled an audience primarily of school-age children with tales of his building expertise. “We’re building a military complex and ballroom that will be second to none,” he said as kids dangled off their seats, trying to keep cool in the baking sun with paper cups of water. “I was over in China two months ago, and we saw the Great Hall of China; well, now we’re going to have a great hall too.” Trump later led the children like some sort of Pied Piper to get a closer view.

How much time, exactly, does the president devote to his construction projects? Trump tells me he meets with representatives from the ballroom construction crew once a week to discuss their progress, and his official calendar is peppered with meetings about other projects around Washington that can often last an hour or longer. (White House officials say he used to meet about the ballroom as much as twice a week, but that number has decreased recently.) The day after the State of the Union address earlier this year, before U.S. and Iranian officials convened in Geneva for a third round of diplomatic talks, Trump met with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and various companies bidding to redevelop Dulles International Airport. “He cared about the things most people would not even get in the weeds about,” says a former administration official familiar with the meeting. “He had strong thoughts on the parking garage — even though he doesn’t drive. He was also really obsessed with taxiing times.”

Joshua Fisher is the director for management and administration in the White House, a role that has essentially made him Trump’s construction czar, despite his having a background in accounting and politics, not building. “We joke that he is the busiest senior staffer,” another senior staffer tells me. Trump meets with Fisher four or five times a week on all manner of renovation projects, but he is hardly the only administration official who weighs in on the ballroom. “I’ve been in countless meetings on various subjects where he will ask the attendees what they think — the vice-president, secretary of War, secretary of State, myself,” the senior staffer tells me. “He’ll ask, ‘Should we put columns on the ballroom? Which floor do you like?’ Sometimes he has samples of different flooring, different chandeliers.”

The funniest thing about this story, for certain values of black humor, is that everybody around Trump told him not to agree to do hours of interviews with a New York magazine writer for a several-thousand word story on his stupid fucking ballroom, because, you know, that story wouldn’t fit in very well with messages about “affordability” and such. (That’s a word invented by the Democrats to make him look bad. Not a lot of people know that). But he did it anyway, because he just can’t resist talking about his stupid fucking ballroom, which, again, needs to be demolished on Day One of Year Zero.

A striking aspect of all this is the extent to which Trump’s aesthetics are a sort of unconscious camp, if that’s not an oxymoron. He got elected president because the moron public didn’t understand that Donald Trump, the genius businessman of The Apprentice was a made-for-TV joke. They thought the kayfabe was real, but guess who else believes that as well?