The ballroom song and dance has made it even more clear that we as Americans are entering Kim Jong Un territory, in which one supposedly infallible leader gets to make all decisions, even aesthetic ones. Woe to the people of Moscow, who couldn’t escape the looming view of Stalin’s Seven Sisters skyscrapers in “Stalinist Gothic” style. Woe to the citizens of Turkmenistan, whose dictators decided to clad the capitol in fake facades of white marble. Architecture under authoritarian rule becomes propaganda in stone: the illusion of permanence. These are the reasons why the president is attempting to give Washington, D.C., from the White House to the Kennedy Center, a gilded, supersized makeover.
Consider this statement from Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, quoted in The New York Times on Sunday: “President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands.” The best builder and developer? Donald J. Trump? The man who, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, bankrupted three properties in Atlantic City in the 1990s, stiffing hundreds of small contractors and selling his yacht, the Trump Princess, to try to partially settle with his creditors? The man who borrowed $390 million to purchase the Plaza Hotel, only to have to sell his remaining shares at an enormous loss to a prince of Saudi Arabia a few years on?
The design for the Trump ballroom keeps shifting, as the administration rushes to push it through without the usual review by the usual authorities. What can be said of it, concretely, is that it is mammoth. According to The Times, “by cubic volume, and including the porticos, it’s more than three times as large” as the White House residence. The ceilings of the cavernous ballroom, which can accommodate 1,500, tower 40 feet. It will block the view of the White House from the Capitol — a sight line between two branches of government intentionally planned by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the engineer who laid out the city.
On Tuesday came a twist in the tale of the emperor’s new ballroom. Once again, the judges are standing between the grasping executive branch to defend the rights of the Legislature. Judge Richard J. Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued a 35-page opinion that the executive branch likely does not have the authority to replace entire sections of the White House without consulting Congress. Citing Congress’s “authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the government’s spending,” Judge Leon sharply made the point that this legal tussle isn’t just about the building, it is — once again — about the executive branch attempting to wrench power away from the voting public’s representatives.
He also raised pointed questions about private donations being channeled in a murky manner into the ballroom project. “The president says he has raised more than $350 million from personal backers and around two dozen tech, cryptocurrency, and defense corporations to fund the building of the structure without government support,” The Times reported. Meanwhile, the group Public Citizen “found that two-thirds of the publicly identified corporate donors had received government contracts, collectively valued at more than $275 billion.” It’s a dirty business.
Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued the Trump administration over the proposed ballroom, made a very good point in The New York Times on Sunday: Such careful deliberations over historical buildings — however trying, slow, or occasionally comical they may be — are an expression of democracy; no project involving iconic public buildings should be guided by just one man’s vision.