Bonwit Teller all over again
In sort of pre-weekend wrap-up, Kevin Kruse on Thursday provided a summary — I was going to type “Bluesky summary” and reconsidered — of Donald Trump’s recent crimes against the republic:
Over the past week, the president said the DOJ should pay him a quarter billion dollars, bulldozed half the White House to build himself a gaudy ballroom, bragged about murdering civilians in international waters, pardoned some more criminals, directed federal prosecutors to indict his opponents …
… called several African American politicians “low IQ,” called all Democrats terrorists, insisted the 7 million Americans who protested his regime were all paid, showed a video of him flying a jet and dropping shit all over them, sent $40 billion to Argentina to prop up a fellow dipshit tyrant …
… threatened to invade every state in the US, renewed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and vowed his people would prevent it from happening “again,” bragged about illegally slashing programs Democrats like, said he would send disaster relief to a state because it voted for him …
… severed economic aid to Colombia in a tantrum, threatened to crack down on NYC, announced drug prices would be coming down “500 percent,” claimed Pete Buttigieg tried to fix the air traffic system with “glass wire,” and committed probably a dozen other crimes we’ve already forgotten about.
Also this week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature on Wednesday passed yet another in along line of heavily gerrymandered congressional maps. (I attended the Democrats’ Tuesday rally against it.) Republicans redrew the map because, as one Republican admitted, Trump asked them to. A court ordered fair map resulted in a 7R-7D split in 2022. Republicans quickly redrew it to 10R-4D once the GOP gained control of the state Supreme Court. This one looks like 11R-3D.
Team autocrat is not done either. Former Trump adviser Steve “Two Shirts” Bannon gave an interview this week to The Economist . Bannon declared that there is a plan for running Trump for a third term in 2028:
Asked if the 22nd amendment could prove to be a hard barrier to remaining in the White House, Bannon expanded: “There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there is a plan, and Trump will be the president in ‘28.”
Don’t rule out a military dictatorship.
Trump may have timed his unsanctioned demolition of the East Wing of the White House as a thumb-in-the-eye response to millions of opponents taking to America’s streets last Saturday. But that’s unclear. Nor is the origin of his obsession with building a ballroom over four times the size of the one at his tacky Mar-a-Lago resort. One friend suggested it stems from his visit in 1987 to the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, USSR.
As for his wanton destruction of the East Wing with no apparent attempt at preservation of historically significant accoutrements or consultation with preservationists, a friend from New York reminded me Thursday that that is Trump’s style.
The 1929 Bonwit Teller and Co. flagship store that once stood where Trump Tower stands in Manhattan was designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. When it reopened in 1930 as Stewart Bonwit Teller, the owners worked with world-famous artists. “Starting in 1936, the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí regularly decorated the windows with spectacular installations.” But when the future president acquired the building, Artnet notes:
This part of the history of art and of New York City appears to have eluded Donald Trump. And that’s not all: the developer wasn’t even willing to save the artworks inside the building from destruction, breaking a promise to the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is nearby, because profit and time were dearer to him than culture.
[…]
Close to the top of the 11-story building there were two limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing, in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art had expressed a strong interest for its sculpture collection. The Metropolitan, one of the largest and most important museums in the world, had also wanted to add to its department of applied 20th century art the six-by-nine meter, geometric-patterned bronze latticework that hung over the entrance at Bonwit Teller. By all accounts, Trump had agreed to donate both, if his workers were able to remove them from the walls.
Trump reneged the way he promised his new ballroom would not touch the existing East Wing. As my friend put it, his “goons” ripped down the panels in the middle of the night.
In truth, Trump’s biographer Harry Hurt III confirmed, Trump himself ensured that the workers were told to remove the bronze latticework over the entrance with blowtorches, separate the friezes from the walls with jackhammers and break them off with crowbars, and throw them down into the interior of the building where they shattered into a million pieces.
And on Trump’s “execrable taste,” Paul Krugman replies:
I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.
[…]
So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.
He can and he did. Only this time, it was property Trump did not own. You did.
(h/t FC, AP)
Update: FYI, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) bunker is underneath what was the East Wing.
* * * * *
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense