A picture is truly worth a thousand words –– or in this case, many thousands.
Last week, as President Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing came into full view, America experienced a split-screen reality and dissonance. Alongside images showing the full extent of the White House’s wreckage, headlines blared similar versions of how “Trump’s poll numbers are collapsing.” Stories promised that inflation and the economy will doom him. Republicans, they said, fear a rout in the upcoming midterms.
Much of the coverage was premature and dangerous, making it appear as if nothing in our politics has changed, when of course it has. We are reeling toward a post-democratic America, a fact that Trump’s destruction of the White House blatantly underscores and symbolizes.
The president is remaking the White House in his image and name. In place of the East Wing will be a 90,000 square foot, gilded, glass-walled ballroom, which is already being informally called “The Donald J. Trump Ballroom” by administration officials. (Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported on Oct. 24 that the “name will likely stick.”) The ballroom is set to be financed by private donors whose names will apparently be engraved on the structure’s edifice. Many of these donors include billion-dollar corporations whose leaders are seeking favors and regulatory approvals from the administration.
As University of California, Berkeley professor and former labor secretary Robert Reich has observed, the new ballroom will be Trump’s own “Versailles” — a monument to greed and a new Gilded Age. Despite the president’s claims, it will not be “an assembly hall, dance hall, music hall, dining hall, village hall, or town hall,” Reich said. “It will be a giant banquet and ballroom designed to accommodate 650 wealthy VIPs.”
Trump’s other changes to the White House follow the same pattern: Gilt throughout to match his beloved Mar-a-Lago. The iconic Rose Garden paved over as a concrete patio.
In an essay published by The Conversation, R. Grant Gilmore III, an archeologist and expert on public memory, explains that Trump’s physical makeover of the White House represents a larger authoritarian project to reshape American society.
“Dictators, tyrants and kings build monumental architecture to buttress their own egos, which is called authoritarian monumentalism,” Gilmore writes. “They also seek to build the national ego — another word for nationalism… Many leaders throughout history have built “temples to power” while erasing or overshadowing the memory of their predecessors — a practice known as damnatio memoriae, or condemnation to oblivion.”
Trump’s demolition of the East Wing and the Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Garden— as well as his radical desecration of the Rose Garden outside the West Wing, and his executive order demanding neoclassical architecture for government buildings — makes it clear that he “is targeting not just the building but the stories they tell,” Gilmore says. “By challenging narratives that depart from white, Anglo-Saxon origin myths, Trump is using his power to roll back decades of work toward creating a more inclusive national history.”
By remodeling the White House, the president is declaring, both literally and symbolically, that what was once the people’s house now belongs to him and his MAGA movement. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he has no intention of ever leaving it.
By remodeling the White House, the president is declaring, both literally and symbolically, that what was once the people’s house now belongs to him and his MAGA movement. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he has no intention of ever leaving it.
Since he returned to office in January, Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly floated the idea of him serving an unconstitutional third term. His website sells “Trump 48” hats. The day after the most recent “No Kings” protests, the president shared an AI-generated video on his Truth Social platform depicting himself as president forever. On Monday, during his trip to Asia, Trump told reporters he would “love to” serve a third term.
The president’s public confession came on the heels of comments from his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who claimed in an interview with The Economist that there is a plan for Trump to “win” a third term. Bannon described the president as an “instrument of divine will and providence.”
Speaking to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Russian dissident Gary Kasparov warned that the 2026 midterms will not be fair. “They’re sharpening this tool that is aimed at the very heart of American democracy,” he said, predicting that Trump would never relinquish power voluntarily.
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MAGA’s authoritarian tactics include voter nullification and voter suppression, intimidation of election officials, taking control of voting machines, and efforts to end mail-in voting. They also encompass attempts to nullify the Fourteenth Amendment, gut the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, restrict the First Amendment through executive orders and other directives, chill civil society and threaten de facto martial law using the Insurrection Act.
Federal judges are now warning that if Trump can violate the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act by using the National Guard and the military against the American people, then the country’s democracy will be functionally over.
Steady State, a network of 340 former national security officers and experts from the CIA, the NSA, the State Department and other agencies, has issued a similar warning: The United States is on a “trajectory” towards authoritarian rule.
“To conduct the assessment,” the Guardian reported, “the authors applied the same analytic methods used by US intelligence agencies to assess the fragility of democracies abroad but turned them inward for what the group called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis of domestic democratic decline. ‘We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home,’ the group said in a statement upon its release.”
A Bright Line Watch survey of more than 500 political scientists reached the same conclusion: America is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.
Legal scholars are warning that the military’s attacks on civilians in Latin America who are allegedly working for drug cartels violate both international and American law. Trump has already ordered covert action aimed at destabilizing Venezuela in pursuit of regime change.
In many ways, today’s political centrists, institutionalists and other mainstream types are like the workers in an early 20th century coal town in Appalachia. Miners were paid in scrip, the company’s version of money that could only be used at the company store or in the businesses nearby that honored it. A story goes that one day, the store owner announced that the mines were closed. “We don’t take those wooden nickels anymore,” he said. The miners’ pockets were full of junk.
The same question confronts American democracy. In Donald Trump’s America, the old rules of politics no longer apply. It is long past time for the mainstream news media and political class to accept that reality and adapt to it accordingly. Anything less is civic malpractice. Worse yet, it’s a betrayal of the American people.
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