If there’s one thing Trump is excellent at doing, it’s inciting outrage among vast swaths of the population. The ongoing ballroom-cum–demolition derby debacle at the White House is no exception, the president deploying wanton destruction, donor corruption, and outright lies—with design choices at the intersection of nouveau riche and neoclassique—in a way that by now feels entirely predictable. As, in this case, it was: Trump is obsessed with monumentalizing his own existence, so it was only a matter of time until he finally decided to take his Roman Statue Twitter guy courtiers up on their offer to “make federal architecture beautiful again.” Since the Obama years, Trump has been talking about the need for a White House ballroom to replace the temporary tents and regalia hauled out during state dinners, and part of this project’s sour-grapes backstory (one more Trumpian hallmark) is that he claims to have once proposed the idea to his predecessor’s adviser David Axelrod, only to be snubbed.
To be fair, knocking down the East Wing, partic…
