No. of Recommendations: 8
By the time of my visit to the nation’s capital, our president had already leveled the East Wing of the White House, the side where the public entrance used to be, where guests were once welcomed. We were standing on the west side of the complex, watching a movement of heavy machinery that seemed arbitrary, unplanned, and chaotic. Since the semi driver had to make a whole series of turns before backing in, it was not hard to see his load: a CZM utility drilling rig. It would join the collection of other heavy equipment at the edge of a pit.
Why was this troubling? The destruction of the East Wing is the vanity project of someone who regards the White House as a permanent private residence. I presume that the expansion of the bunker is more important than whatever might be built on the surface. Given that the parts of the White House that are still standing are being redecorated with fake-gilded Home-Depot gewgaws, any ballroom would likely be hideous. The impression given in every Trump endeavor is that he takes everything for himself, and yet somehow never has the money to hand to do anything right. He has endless donations, but no one seems to know where it is.So I was young and I was naive the first time, around forty years ago, that I walked around the White House. And yet that idea, that these spaces should belong to us, the people, is essential for any possible American democracy. It has of course never been fulfilled, but there is a difference between the partial realization of an ideal and its contemptuous rejection. The heavy equipment halting the natural flow of people in order to wreak oligarchical havoc behind walls of mendacity obfuscation and graft -- that felt like rejection, dismissal, scorn.
For someone like the president, or the vice-president, or for that matter for the surrounding clutch of oligarchs, none of what I write here has any meaning. For them, it is unthinkable that something -- a space, a monument, a White House, a city, a country -- could belong to the people and not to a private individual. And it is within that vacuum of values, that they live and they act. And so they dig a pit for themselves where once we had a meeting place which, with time and work, might have been for everyone.
This Trump thing will not work. It cannot work. But the destruction has gone far enough, the nihilism has dug deep enough, that we cannot think about going back. Even the idea of rebuilding is not enough.
If there is an America on the other side of this, it will have to be a different country, a better one, based not on the restoration of hopes that people my age once had, but on a broader sense of the future, a better American dream. I think that this America is in there, beneath the pain and the indignation; I believe that it is out there, among the voters and the protests. It will take work, work not of pits and barriers, but of organization and courage. —Professor Timothy Snyder
