The president says the sound of bulldozers at the East Wing is “music to my ears.”
“You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back,” Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday from a podium overlooking his newly paved “Rose Garden Club” terrace, alongside the new “Presidential Walk of Fame” featuring gold-framed portraits of his predecessors (and an “autopen” for Joe Biden).
“You hear that sound?” he said, raising his hand to his ear as if to savor the clamor from construction of the new $300 million White House ballroom that began Monday.
“Ahhh, that’s music to my ears. I love that sound. Other people don’t like it, I love it.”
It was a wry jab at Trump-deranged critics of his big, beautiful ballroom, who are losing their minds over his beautification of the White House.
Suddenly, the people who cheered on as vandal revolutionaries toppled statues of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln or tore down Confederate monuments are ardent preservers of American history.
“Just grotesque,” snarled renowned aesthete, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough.
“It’s history being torn to shreds.”
This is the guy who championed “Fort Al Sharpton” to supplant the historic titles of military bases named after Confederate generals.
“It’s not his house,” tweeted Hillary Clinton, whose best-known contribution to the White House was making off with $28,000 of furniture when she and Bill moved out.
“It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
Whoopi Goldberg, who once urged on the removal of a Lincoln statue in Boston, bellowed at Trump through a TV camera from her perch at ABC’s “The View”: “You don’t own that building!”
Ironic criticism
Irony of all ironies, Joe Biden’s former DEI press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared the ballroom, which is being funded by Trump and other private donors as a gift to the nation, “is corruption at its core.”
This from a woman who gaslit America on Biden family grifting, not to mention her boss’ cognitive collapse.
“There’s no greater metaphor for what’s happening right now in this country than watching Donald Trump take a wrecking ball to the White House,” she said.
Spare us.
The ballroom is a historic — and well overdue — enhancement of the White House and won’t cost the taxpayer a penny.
There will also be a reinforced, attack-proof steel roof and all sorts of other national security enhancements long on the wish list of the US military, which Trump hinted at Wednesday during a meeting with the secretary-general of NATO in the Oval Office.
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“The military is very much involved in this. They want to make sure everything is absolutely beautiful.”
Waving around architectural drawings, Trump also admitted for the first time that the East Wing will be demolished — and fast, probably by the weekend.
As a seasoned property developer, he knows that you never give naysayers time to complain.
Jean-Pierre is right about one thing, though.
Trump’s beautification and improvement projects at the White House really are a metaphor for what he is attempting for the country as a whole.
Taking pride in DC
For instance, he takes personal pride in the restoration of Washington, DC, since he announced his crime crackdown.
He equates civic beauty with law and order, something his critics can’t understand.
“I hop in the Beast,” he said on Tuesday, “and I tell the Secret Service, ‘Let’s drive around town . . .
“This place is looking really good, and we haven’t even started on the real fixing-up of the town. We’re getting rid of the graffiti . . . a lot of that beautiful statuary marble had red graffiti all over it . . .
“The grass is good, the fences are down, there’s no tents . . . it’s just a whole new look and the most important thing is there’s no crime. We’re going to fix the roads — we have great pavers. We’re going to fix the medians in between the roads which half of them are falling down. We’re going to take some of the tiles off the tunnels — they’ve been up for 40 years and they’re rotted — we’ll put up brand new gorgeous white tiles.”
Trump treats the White House and all its artifacts with reverence, and is always walking around rearranging portraits and furniture, when he’s not blinging up the Oval Office or planning an “Arc de Trump.”
He was personally affronted when a cameraman bumped into a mirror on the wall of the Cabinet Room Monday where the president was meeting with the Australian prime minister.
“Ay-yi-yi,” he clucked in dismay.
“That mirror is 400 years old . . . I just moved it up here, special from the vaults, and the first thing that happens — a camera hits it. Hard to believe, but these are the problems in life.”
To understand Trump’s mindset — the big-vision statesman and detail-freak perfectionist, you have to read “Under Siege,” the riveting bestseller just released by younger son Eric Trump, a chip off the old block in every way but love of the limelight.
Eric, who took over his father’s multibillion-dollar property empire at age 33 and calls himself “the most subpoenaed man in history,” has written a searing account of the attacks his family endured once Trump entered politics, and how it made them all stronger.
Largely silent
We know about the lawfare against Trump, but the family has been largely silent about the concerted effort to destroy their businesses, from the jailing of their long-time chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, to being debanked by the likes of Chase, First Republic, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Signature Bank, Investors Savings Bank, Cushman & Wakefield, Aon Insurance, Professional Bank, Shopify and Barclays.
It’s a tribute to Eric that he held it all together.
But what really comes through in the book is his father’s passion for building and creating.
Eric writes that his father put him to work young on his construction projects and taught him the value of a dollar.
But Trump also taught his son to “love and appreciate craftsmanship [and the] people who are capable of creating something beautiful with their hands. We live in a world where many people can’t hang a picture on a wall correctly.”
Donald Trump “is a builder. He built skylines, resorts, and businesses. And he built a family.”
Now the president is putting that passion for building beautiful things into restoring America. His opponents haven’t built a thing. They are just good at nitpicking and destruction.