Do you ever watch those shows where a couple buys an old castle or post office or church so they can turn it into their dream home, but they do it knowing they are purchasing a historic property – which means there are going to be limits to what they can alter? They can restore the front door, for example, but they can’t replace it. They can strengthen the porch, but they can’t change the structure of it, or the height, or the width of the columns if there are any.
They have to preserve the spirit and bones of the place, for future generations. People who buy properties like that do it out of love and respect. They want to take a structure that is beautiful and important to the community, in some cases one that has been neglected, and restore it to its former glory.
Sometimes it’s frustrating, though. Maybe there’s a window at a height that doesn’t make sense, or there’s a wall that’s begging for a window. Or maybe they’d really love to put the kitchen in the front of the house where it would make more sense for entertaining, but they can’t, because the local historic society won’t approve the plumbing reconfiguration.
I’ve seen instances where all construction stops because there’s an issue with a certain tile or paint color, and a couple who’s thrown their entire life savings into a project has to wait and hope they’re going to get approval to continue work, even if the change they want is rejected.
I’ve seen some pretty wild and disappointing things the last couple of days, but that’s by design – not mine, this administration’s. I keep thinking I can’t be shocked further because I forget who we’re dealing with somehow, so the idea that I might see the East Wing of the White House gaping open, wires exposed, drywall flying, bricks in piles - the entire side of the building just demolished – simply didn’t occur to me.
It feels like a metaphor for everything that is happening to the country I love at the hands of this awful man. A wrecking ball to democracy, no one stopping it.
I could have sworn the president said the ballroom was not going to touch the White House – it would be near it, but not touching it – because he did say that. He says lots of things, and then he does whatever he wants and gets away with it.
His supporters are unshakeable, I’ve rarely seen such blind loyalty. Under videos of the demolition, where people express heartbreak and dismay, where they ask how this can be legal, there are comments about “TDS” and “manufactured outrage.” These are the same people who were apoplectic over President Obama’s tan suit and Michelle Obama’s exposed arms.
They spew Mike Johnson/Fox News talking points about the Truman rebuild (I’ll get to that) and how Obama installed a basketball court (he turned the existing White House tennis court into a basketball court, so yeah, that’s totally the same thing) and how every president makes changes, as if we have ever seen anything like this.
As if they would not be up in freaking arms if the Clintons had done this, or the Obamas or the Bidens. As if, in a reverse situation, they’d be calm and nonchalant, as a president – a temporary tenant of the People’s House – tore down the East Wing with no oversight or approval.
The White House is not the president’s property. It is federal property managed by the National Park Service and maintained by taxpayer money. Our money. This is why it is called “The People’s House” because presidents come and go. While the First Family is given some leeway when it comes to redecorating the living quarters to meet their tastes and needs (Congress allots $100k, anything over that is expected to come from them), there have always been strict rules about any rooms not located on the second or third floors.
I found an article on House Digest about prior rules and norms the First Family has always been “forced to follow” and it is fascinating, but here’s a timely little excerpt:
When it comes to renovations, there are certain rooms and floors in the White House that are off-limits to anyone with a paintbrush, a pack of laminate flooring, and a healthy budget. According to ABC News, the Lincoln Room and Yellow Oval Room must remain untouched, and any room not on the second or third floors must pretty much be left alone. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Kate Andersen Brower, author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies, explained, “They are not going to let Trump in and tear down the walls,” adding, “Some parts are essentially historic rooms and belong to the American people, not to the families who live there.”
Despite a rumor that Trump had once spoken with the Obama administration about building a $100 million ballroom within the White House, the former president once said, “The White House is a special place, you don’t want to do much touching.” Brower backed up Trump’s statement and added, “I don’t think we will see any garishness that some people associate with his brand. Just because you’re the leader of the free world and one of the most recognizable fellas on the planet doesn’t mean you can install a major White House feature at the drop of a hat. No sir! These things require permission, even if your name is Mr. President.”
Huh. While the First Family might swap out furniture – there is a White House warehouse that stores furniture and artwork collected by former presidents to choose from – when it comes to knocking down walls or rebuilding, that has always required congressional approval and federal funding, along with transparency and public review. Because again, it’s our house, not his.
The White House is maintaining that demolition does not require prior approval, just construction, and they will send the plans to the National Capital Planning Commission when the time is right. The head of that commission is Trump-appointed Will Scharf – who just happens to be a White House staff secretary. Which is hilarious or enraging depending on your mood, because obviously once you demolish the entire East Wing, you’re going to need to construct something to close up the giant, gaping hole you just created. And it’s pretty likely the guy you appointed who works for you is going to approve your plans!
Also, it isn’t true. On Tuesday, The National Trust for Historic Preservation – a leading historic preservation non-profit created by Congress – sent a letter to the White House letting them know demolition plans were “legally required” to go through public review, and urging Trump to pause demolition until they had. It says, in part:
Owned by the American people, the White House was designed by Irish architect James Hoban, whose winning proposal was selected by President George Washington. The building respects Georgian and neoclassical principles. It is a National Historic Landmark, a National Park, and a globally recognized symbol of our nation’s ideals.
We respectfully urge the Administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes, including consultation and review by the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, and to invite comment from the public. These processes provide a crucial opportunity for transparency and broad engagement—values that have guided preservation of the White House under every administration going back to the public competition in 1792 that produced the building’s original design. Doing so will help ensure that the project both honors the exceptional historic significance of the White House and acknowledges the investment that the American people have in the preservation of this beloved place.
The National Trust stands ready to assist the White House, the National Park Service, and relevant review agencies in exploring design alternatives and modifications that would accomplish the objectives of the Administration while preserving the historic integrity and symbolism of the People’s House.
As we approach the 250th Anniversary of our country’s founding, the preservation of historic places that represent our nation’s history has never been more relevant or important. We urge you to take into account the deep reverence that all Americans hold for this iconic place, and to initiate the review process that can ensure the preservation of the historic White House for future generations.
Sincerely,
Dr. Carol Quillen
President and Chief Executive Officer
The last time the White House underwent any kind of huge structural renovation was during Truman’s presidency, and it happened due to concerns about safety. A federal inspector reportedly said there was such structural decay the building was “standing up from force of habit only.” Congress approved a full reconstruction, and from 1948-1952 the Trumans moved across the street to the Blair House while The White House was under construction. Here is a history of The White House, in photos.
Here is a statement from the Society of Architectural Historians:
“While we recognize that the White House is a building with evolving needs, and that it has undergone various exterior and interior modifications since construction began in 1792, the proposed ballroom will be the first major change to its exterior appearance in the last 83 years (since the East Wing in its current form was built in 1942). Therefore, such a significant change to a historic building of this import should follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process.”
It is okay if you feel heartbroken over the destruction of this historical landmark, and it’s okay if you don’t. It is okay if you feel helpless or angry or exhausted because this man seems to get away with whatever he likes and no one does anything. It’s hard. I found myself feeling devastated yet again that the people who support him shrug in the face of this, too. They say, “So what? He’s paying for it himself.”
I have to laugh or cry. I am a trusting person. I extend trust to people until they give me a reason not to, and then I’ll give a second chance and maybe even a third. But if you tell me something three times and it turns out you were lying to my face, or you gave me your word and broke it, or you said one thing and did another? Yeah, I don’t believe you anymore. Guess I’m strange that way, because these people still believe this guy.
Couple of quick things – right around the time he said the ballroom was going to cost $250 million (now it’s $300 million), he also started talking about his court cases against the DOJ. Court cases he brought because he was so angry he was investigated over potential Russian interference in the 2016 election, and this other thing…what was it? Oh. Yeah. Inciting an insurrection.
You all remember January 6th, right? “Hang Mike Pence”? The noose swinging in the wind? A violent mob attacking our nation’s capitol, attacking the Capitol Police and D.C. Metro Police with flagpoles and bear spray, beating Michael Fanone almost to death and breaking down doors and breaking windows and defecating on the Senate floor and running through the halls trying to hunt down Nancy Pelosi? I’m sorry, it’s the Left they call “violent radical lunatics” correct? And they’re very concerned about safety on the streets, but their president pardoned every last one of these people on his first day in Office? And one of them just threatened to assassinate Hakeem Jeffries? Just checking.
Anyway, he’s angry the DOJ investigated him for inciting that insurrection. He’s pissed that even though he didn’t want Mike Pence to certify the free and fair election Joe Biden won, and even though he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressured him to find more votes that didn’t exist (election fraud, we found it!) and even though his inaction for 187 minutes put everyone’s lives at risk at the Capitol – he is furious that the DOJ investigated him.
Funny, because I’m furious they didn’t convict him of the federal crime he committed and put him in jail where he belongs. But he is irate that he – the great DJT of The Apprentice – had his “right to privacy violated” and he is suing the DOJ that he now runs to the tune of $230 million dollars.
Guess who pays that $230 million? We do! Yup, taxpayer dollars. So he incites an insurrection, and then sues the government he now leads for violating his privacy, and declares that he will be the one to decide whether he should get the payout. But if he decides to award that money to himself, which he will — don’t worry, America, he’ll donate it to charity (hahahahahahahahaha) — or he’ll use it for the ballroom. Gee, I wonder what he’ll do.
Here’s the other thing, there’s no transparency. Not just with the architectural plans, with any of it. After January 6th, YouTube suspended his account for violating their terms of service. Now that he’s president again, and now that he has all the regulatory bodies under his thumb – the ones that used to be independent bodies – he can threaten private companies like YouTube, and he did. So they bent the knee, and as part of their settlement deal, they’re donating $22 million to the ballroom!
There was a fundraising dinner this month, and I bet you can guess which other big companies were there – Amazon, Meta, Google, Open AI, Palantir, Microsoft, Blackstone, Lockheed Martin, and Apple. I think we can assume they’ve all donated about the same. Carrier is going to donate a state-of-the-art HVAC system. How nice. Pretty sure this is called pay-to-play, and it’s illegal.
The chances that he will spend a dime of his own money on this project are as good as the chances that Lara Trump will take home a Grammy. You can’t blame his supporters for believing this fiction, though. They’re just following their leaders. Mike Johnson gets up and tells one bold-faced lie after another. I no longer believe the man considers himself a Christian. No god-fearing man could lie that much, that brazenly. If he believes in Hell, he knows he’s going. Maybe all these guys think their money will save them. They’ll make deals with the Devil and continue the debauchery and looting down there.
Maybe they figure they’re already going because of Epstein. They followed him to the island, he’s waiting for them in Hell, so might as well take everything they can get while they’re here, no holds barred. Karoline Leavitt will be there with her machine gun lips, Vance will sit on the couch checking people in, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will share a lava-side bungalow. The president and all his spawn will be there, but no one will see them because they’ll be manning the grill, making Big Macs for all eternity.
It’s not just the ballroom, we’re in two completely different realities. For instance, did you all hear George Soros paid for the No Kings event last Saturday? Why didn’t anyone tell me, and where is my check? Where’s my free pizza? I just went with my sign and one of my besties because I love democracy and care about this country and the Constitution – I care enough that I went for free. No one told me I could get paid!
That’s what they’re being told on the other algorithm – that 8 million people got paid to take to the streets and protest this administration – and they believe it I guess because they love the guy, unfathomable as I find it. To me, it’s like saying you love to step in dog crap, and then rub it all over yourself. I’m not exaggerating, I find him that detestable, maybe because he makes videos about dumping shit on me and people who think like me.
On the other algorithm they think he’s brokered fifteen peace deals and the tariffs have made the country billions, and kids aren’t getting gender reassignment surgeries during recess anymore, and no one is having post-birth abortions thanks to him, phew. They’re like sorry, but the majority of people voted to have safe borders, so deal with it!
Oh, and they are still really butt-mad about the pandemic, because that’s when there was authoritarianism, not now, because you had to get a shot that wasn’t safe and didn’t even stop the virus and you weren’t allowed to see your family or friends, and small businesses had to shutter, but big businesses could stay open. And you had to show your vaccination papers when you went to work. Oh and also Kamala was installed, no one voted for her, so that was also authoritarianism.
I don’t know that I can do the pandemic thing again, especially when you are talking to people who want to believe measles is back because of undocumented immigrants. Really? That’s funny, because our immigration system has been broken for decades, but this year --2025 – we have more measles cases than we’ve had any year since measles was declared eradicated in 2000. So what changed? Think hard if the first thing springing to mind is not a guy with three easy initials and a brain-worm.
I’m so sorry the first global pandemic any of us lived through was difficult. Let me get out the world’s tiniest violin and play My Heart Breaks for You since you are still whining about it. Guess what? It sucked for all of us. My mother was dying of ALS on the other side of the country, and I could not go see her for months because of that fucking virus, okay? It was devastating. My kids were doing zoom school, too. I own a small business and I had to make all kinds of adjustments to keep a roof over our heads, and none of it was easy.
You want to know something, though? I am so grateful to the doctors and nurses and scientists and epidemiologists who came through for all of us. We’ve never been through anything like that before, but vaccines? We’ve had those for a long fucking time, maybe you’ve heard of polio? mRNA vaccine research had been going on for a decade prior to the pandemic thanks to other coronaviruses that had been studied for fifty years. Let me drop some links.
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/were-the-covid-19-vaccines-rushed
https://www.matherhospital.org/wellness-at-mather/myth-busting-the-covid-19-vaccines/
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/covid-vaccine-came-out-super-quickly-heres-why-its-safe
I could post 900 links to reliable, vetted, JAMA experts, but it won’t matter because some YouTube-on-the-can warrior will hit me back and tell me they’ve done their own research and I’m an idiot believing Big Pharma. Because that’s who they think I am, some kind of sheep who just eats what I’m fed.
Who I am is someone who believes we over-prescribe in this country and often treat the symptom. I think there’s a lot of crap in our food so I go out of my way to avoid it, and I do not blindly trust anyone. I also know my history and that includes the history of diseases like the bubonic plague or Black Death, cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, polio, measles, smallpox – and I understand it’s doctors and scientists and people who were willing to study these diseases who largely eradicated them.
I trust and respect them a lot more than a guy who thinks the baby grows “inside a woman’s placenta.” A baby grows inside a woman’s uterus. The placenta is an organ that grows on the uterine wall as the baby grows, and attaches to the baby through the umbilical cord. It’s how the baby gets nutrients from its mother and also oxygen. I can’t stand RFK, Jr, or anyone who accepts a job they aren’t qualified to do when it puts other people in danger.
After I got the COVID vaccine, I raced across the country to see my mother. By then she was not in good shape at all. ALS had ravaged her and she was so thin and fragile I was afraid to hug her too hard. She couldn’t speak anymore, she typed into an app, and a robotic voice would say the words out loud. She could barely swallow, she spent most of the day trying to get a smoothie down, one sip at a time, by holding her chin and forcing her lips together. Her jaw muscles had gone slack by then. She’d stand at the kitchen sink, holding onto the counter with one hand, her chin with the other, lean her head back and sway to swallow. I can’t write about this any longer right now. It broke me. Some things don’t heal.
The next time I saw her was in the ICU after I raced across the country in a panic, after she was rushed there one morning because she couldn’t breathe. This was the end of November, 2021. COVID everywhere. That’s who was in the ICU with her, people dying of COVID, so I know a little bit about what doctors and nurses were dealing with, about too many bodies and not enough room in the morgue, about refrigerated vans outside, about what it sounds like when a ventilator breathes for someone. My mother was on a ventilator for the ALS and pneumonia. The people in every other bed around her were on ventilators for COVID.
I know what it is when someone you love is dying and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it, but there’s a nurse there to cry with you, and a doctor there to tell you what to expect. I know whether the vaccines helped save lives, my god. I got to know the people on the front lines, I spent a month with them in the ICU. Some of the best people on the face of the earth. I really can’t anymore. If you want to “do your own research” why don’t you get off YouTube and go volunteer in an ICU?
ICE arrested a bunch of nannies in New York City yesterday, on the Upper West Side at a nursery school, right before pick-up. Nannies. Thank god they’re off the streets of New York where they can’t hurt anyone anymore. Thank god Ghislaine Maxwell is enjoying her time at Camp Fed while Virginia Giuffre’s children still mourn her.
Thank god Mike Johnson gets up and continues to blame Democrats for a shut down he could end right this second if he had a Christian bone in his body and gave a shit. Thank god Argentina gets $40 billion from us, Kristi Noem gets 2 private jets to the tune of $173 million dollars, but Republicans have no plan for affordable healthcare for Americans.
It’s not about the White House – a structure that was built by the forced labor of enslaved people. It’s the fucking gall of the man inside it, who wants to wipe that part of history from the record, who replaces PBS with PragerU and doesn’t want to have little white kids feel too terrible about slavery. A man who violates the Constitution and the rights of American citizens and our immigrant community every day, as he destroys a house that doesn’t belong to him - and fleeces the country while half its people cheer him on.
It’s time to draft a better plan, friends, I’ve had enough of these Kens, haven’t you?
I literally haven't read this yet but I am about to, however felt the need to say from word one that your title is 100% perfection no notes.
That title is gold ❤️