President Donald Trump has done it again — sent the left and the media (but I repeat myself) down a rabbit hole of absurdity.
“It’s like the media is a cat and Trump has the world’s biggest laser pointer,” Margo Cleveland posted on X, “with it currently aimed at the new ballroom.”
That’s right: While Trump tours Asia, dancing, making trade deals and apparently having a blast, he’s got his opponents back in the Swamp obsessing over . . . a home renovation project.
Using donated funds, not taxpayer money, Trump is rebuilding the White House’s shabby East Wing — originally added to cover up construction of a bomb shelter during World War II — to create a large and modern space that meets the needs of today’s presidency.
Naturally, this has the usual gang of idiots fuming.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) on Saturday lectured his fellow Democrats not to even imagine running for the presidential nomination unless they “pledge to take a wrecking ball” to Trump’s renovation.
(Cleveland commented: “The funniest thing about this is not that Swalwell posted it, but that he thought it was so brilliant that he reposted it.”)
Talk show host Joe Walsh, who once cosplayed as a Republican, took up Swalwell’s demand: “I’ll say it every day for the next 3yrs,” he wrote, “any Democrat running for president in 2028 MUST pledge to tear down Trump’s ballroom. It matters.”
Does it? Does it really?
It’s hilarious to see such reactions from Democrats like these, along with Joe Scarbrough, Stephanie Ruhle and other Very Serious People, to a project that enriches our national infrastructure and won’t cost taxpayers a dime.
Those who a couple of years ago were toppling monuments to America’s founders and denouncing America itself as a slave state are now posing as defenders of our deep history and heritage.
Because nothing says “deep history and heritage” like a structure built in 1942 to hide a bomb shelter.
Trump’s new White House annex will contain a lot more space, including a huge ballroom with a drone-proof metal roof and other security enhancements.
Up to now, big state dinners have been held in tents on the White House lawn, with portable space heaters, awkward temporary restrooms — and zero overhead protection against security threats like drones, which are becoming a bigger and bigger danger.
The new building will make formal receptions and other big events safer and more comfortable.
Even some on the left are jumping ship on this ridiculous outcry against an addition that many, including Biden and Obama staffers, have publicly advocated.
The Washington Post, no friend of Trump’s, editorialized in favor of the renovation — while complaining about the way he’s going about it.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” the paper tut-tutted.
But, it went on, “it is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties.”
And Trump’s rapid construction program contrasts sharply with many other DC-area projects, mired in the usual slough of permitting, environmental reviews and “not in my back yard” complaints from the perpetually aggrieved.
“Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere,” the WaPo concluded with grudging approval.
Heck, even Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is on board.
“They are always wasting millions on tents and heaters and chairs and lights and everything else,” he reasoned on X. “Stop acting like you have some emotional attachment to the East Wing. You don’t.”
But most of the leftists have to pretend.
If Trump is for it, a large segment of this country just has to be against it, and in the most overwrought, over-moralizing way.
They can’t help themselves.
Thus when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted a Harvard study suggesting a link between consuming Tylenol in pregnancy and autism in children, pregnant Democratic women started posting TikTok videos of themselves gobbling the tablets: That’ll show Trump!
Some reportedly wound up in the emergency room, but resisting Trump was more important.
It’s been a longstanding joke on the right that if Trump gave a speech praising “oxygen, beautiful oxygen,” people on the left would cover their heads with plastic bags.
It’s not far from the truth.
All this programmed hysteria does keep a certain segment of the crazy leftist base riled up in a state of excitement that Democratic leadership relies on for donations and votes.
But it seems they’re usually riled up about what Trump wants them to be — that is, things that make them look stupid, and get them chasing that laser dot around in circles.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.