Matt Ford (TNR): The raw spectacle of Trump tearing a hole in the White House to hang out with his rich friends is already a potent symbol of his presidency—almost ham-fisted in a way, as if it were drawn by a third-rate political cartoonist for a fourth-rate newspaper. At every level, the entire project may be the perfect summation of what his administration has been like for the country.
Timothy L. O’Brien (Bloomberg): No president in the modern era has refashioned the White House so extensively and so much in his own image. But Trump is doing more than elevating bad taste by building a monument to himself. He’s anchoring his vision of the presidency to Pennsylvania Avenue and taking a wrecking ball to the quaint notion that the White House’s occupant should have goals and values that transcend grifts and power grabs.
Karoline Leavitt (press secretary): And I believe there’s a lot of fake outrage right now, because nearly every single president who has lived in this beautiful White House behind me has made modernizations and renovations of their own. While many presidents have privately dreamt about this, it’s President Trump who is actually doing something about it. And he is the builder in chief. In large part, he was reelected back to this people’s house because he’s good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.
SMB Sav (commenter): Like Nero’s Domus Aurea or Golden House, this will be torn down when Trump is gone. It should be blocked by attorneys now with lawsuits and injunctions requiring necessary reviews by independent experts. Cheaper to stop the monstrosity now before the plans grow with parking lots, a second floor and more destruction of the White House itself. And Trump should have a brain scan to see how far his Alzheimer’s has progressed.
Senator Chris Murphy (voiceover): Well, listen, there’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal. And yeah, that visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.
Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker): Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life.
I hate it here so much.
I think it needs gold plated slot machines to complete the look.
His lack of taste almost exceeds his lack of empathy. It leaves me feeling less outraged but more nauseated.
Aren’t Trump and the 2025 gang trying to make government smaller, or even get rid of what they say is federal government overreach? In which case, how does a big new ballroom fit into that equation? It doesn’t. What he’s doing is replacing the federal government with a kingdom, like in Louis IV’s France. And all that gold behind him the picture is the tackiest, gaudiest, ugliest display of nouveau riche that I’ve ever seen.