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Donald Trump, demolition man [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-05
President Donald Trump needs to build his gold-plated monstrosity of a ballroom, and he can’t wait a minute more. So he got one of the numerous personal attorneys he has stashed in high-level administration jobs to say that Trump can just start demolishing parts of the White House, no pesky approval needed.
Not content to just wreck the country metaphorically, Trump has to wreck the White House literally. Will Scharf, who Trump named to head the National Capital Planning Commission, said that the NCPC has no jurisdiction over the demolition process. Instead, per Scharf, “What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build.”
Sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about with the construction slang and all. He must have a background in this sort of thing! Lol, of course not. Scharf represented Trump in his immunity decision and made the rounds on television to praise Trump during his hush money trial. So he got rewarded with the staff secretary job and now, apparently, gets to be in charge of how the White House looks.
Huh. So weird that a guy whose entire career is tied up in defending and agreeing with Trump came up with a way to let Trump do exactly what he wants.
The teardown for Trump’s stupid ballroom is no small thing and is expected to change the look of both the East and West Wings. But don’t worry, because you won’t actually know anything more about it. Scharf’s remarks came on Thursday, during the only public meeting the planning commission held before crews start tearing up the White House. Yes, this is the first time anyone has learned that Scharf was just going to give Trump the go-ahead with no oversight.
Although the White House hasn’t even submitted any building plans, Scharf did make sure to offer some praise for Dear Leader about how great they will be regardless: “Given the president’s history as a builder, and given the plans that we’ve seen publicly I think this will be a tremendous addition to the White House complex, a sorely needed addition.”
Related | Trump seeks to leave his gold-plated stain on the White House
Tremendous, sure. Just like all the other shabby properties Trump has built over the years, where he has stiffed construction workers and inflated the property values? There’s no question, given the meager information we’ve seen, that the ballroom is going to look like the one at Mar-a-Lago, all gold-plated, oversized dreck.
Besides speeding through the approval process by simply not having an approval process, Trump has also accelerated the building of this garbage by giving a $200 million no-bid contract to Clark Construction, a thing that is probably illegal. Finally, of course, this renovation is supposed to be donor-funded, which means we will never know who took this opportunity to bribe the president in a new, innovative way.
So, let’s recap. We don’t get to know anything about the demolition of the White House, because there is no oversight and no approval process. And we don’t know anything about what the ballroom will actually look like, because there are no building plans yet. Then we don’t get to know anything about the contractor because they didn’t have to go through an approval process. And we don’t know how it is being paid for. All we really do know is that, because Trump is involved, it is going to be tacky as hell.
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