Sometimes a Wrecking Ball Is Just a Wrecking Ball

Smart people have trouble with stupid things. When confronted with something irreducibly simple, cleverer minds often reject the premise and construct a more convoluted rationale, as if reality needed sprucing up to deserve their attention. At airier epistemic altitudes, this is how you get a generation of research that says, “The best way to help people is to give them money,” and a politics and press that respond with, “That can’t be right.” At street level, this is how you get a president who commits crimes saying, “I intend to commit this crime,” and a protected media class inventing a game of 5D chess to attribute anything but incoming crime to Donald Trump. 

Thankfully, though, some things really are what they are on their face. Donald Trump wants money and attention, and above all he wants what he wants, and there are no other impulses at work except revenge against those who deny him something. The insatiable chasm in Donald Trump eats what it will, and this time it devoured the East Wing of the White House and Jackie Kennedy’s garden in service of a Trump ballroom bankrolled by cowards and goons. There are any number of further motives at work, but, as is the case with the rest of his administration and the nation, those all take a back seat to the Big Man. 

Donald Trump destroyed it because he wanted to. He is increasingly enfeebled, he’s got blood and skin coiling above his socks like the scarf on Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, he’s sundowning earlier and earlier, and once every few weeks he completely disappears for a while and emerges from a hospital. Could his handlers simply be using Trump’s proposed White House ballroom as pretext to recreate features of Mar-a-Lago, which he is increasingly less able to fly to? Sure, that could be happening. On the other hand, apart from redecorating the Oval Office in Saddam’s Palace chic, the White House does not feature any decor in Donald Trump’s preferred style of late ’80s Sea-Doo dealership owner with a cocaine problem. Donald Trump loves destroying things he has no understanding of and replacing them with tacky shit he can put his name all over.

Is it a scheme to collect millions in bribes? Yes. This is the Trump administration; everything is one of those. Could this all be a retributive gesture, a way of spitting at the over 7 million people who showed up last weekend to tell him to go to hell? Almost certainly. The United States is a hostage, and when that many people told Trump they were coming for him, he did the equivalent of when the captor lets the hero see him flick open a switchblade and slice a shallow bloody line down the ingenue’s face. On the other hand, Trump wanted to build this already. Maybe more of the East Wing came down than planned the week before; maybe the schedule accelerated for punitive emphasis, but the project began and was nurtured in his want, the engine of all things.

You can see all this. Anyone can see all this. Trump leveling part of the White House and leaving some of it up on blocks in the yard is a rare and unmediated image done to something that most Americans synonymize with their country. The symbol of the American executive — the symbol for many Americans of America — the metaphor for the function, agency or existence of this nation in every disaster movie, every war film, every terrorism-fueled action plot, every TBS weekend of Movies for Guys Who Like Movies, just got carved up by the same dickhead ruining everything else.

The national political discourse leans fondly on phrases like “saying the quiet part out loud” long past their sell-by date, like when the GOP made the quiet part the entire platform. “Unforced error” gets a similar level of abuse, attributing messages to the party, like the whole platform, as faulty messages to a congealed Centrist America yearning for bipartisan policy. But of all the unforced errors Trump could have committed, demolishing part of the White House and leaving it gashed and exposed leaves nothing to America’s imagination while violating any number of visions of America in its citizens. It is a national monument to Trumpism that needs no guide.

So much of the Trump tyranny’s destruction relies on the passivity of it. One day, the bridge isn’t rebuilt. One decade of vanished USAID later, and eight figures of African children are dead. The river water doesn’t turn orange all at once; polluted air darkens the skies on a long dimmer switch, if it darkens it at all. The holes in our national security or white-collar policing won’t appear until the rubble is smoking or the billions disappear in a suitcase bound for a non-extradition country. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits expire in November, and those who never saw the people dependent on them will never notice when they aren’t there anymore. We will never have the abominable luxury of seeing the Trump administration put all their victims of hunger in one location, where they can die in the worst place possible, on television. 

A hole in the White House is plain and immutable in the way that a protest is not. The New York Times cannot estimate its size as two orders of magnitude smaller than it actually is without everyone noticing. No one can tell you that the East Wing is still there — or most of it — or that it looks good, actually — or that you really wanted a ballroom all along. The media can repeat an administration press release saying it’s only 5 feet wide, but you can just look at it. The news can run with the administration’s framing that they are addressing a critical groundswell of national desire for formal ballrooms, but you know you never thought, “I think someone should level part of the White House without asking,” and you definitely never added, “Because powerful people deserve minuets and mazurkas.”

The sudden gash in the White House, the sudden razing of a portion of it, sends a message more powerful than Trump’s opposition ever could, because he crafted it himself, and actions speak louder than words. It can’t be unsent or drowned out by the next day’s reflexively reversing lie, rolling tape of the demolition in reverse. For those not verging on PTSD from mainlining their social media timeline, or who don’t have the network’s chyron burned into the bottom of their screen from marathoning despair, it asks only a question, maybe the first one like this some people have thought to ask: What if everything he’s done is like this?

It is a simple question and deserves the simple answer. The case for building a better nation belongs to the first people willing to give it.