The demolition of the East Wing is emblematic of a system that has long since stopped caring about the kind of blatant graft that Trump loves.
Demolition of the East Wing of the White House on Wednesday, October 22, 2025.
(Stephanie Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It has long been obvious that the siege of American MAGA governance is a glorified work of destruction, but this week's article was too intrusive: after promising don't pester the White House In the process of constructing a $250 million ballroom addition seemingly plucked from Versailles' glitzy corners, President Donald Trump has now approved the building's demolition. all east wing.
The reckless rush towards golden destruction has drawn a chorus of accusations from National Trust for Historic Preservation Never Trump defense of the People's House (performance deteriorates significantly due to use slave labor to build it) To civil outrage show from former East Wing resident Hillary Clinton (provoking an equally predictable attacks of indignation on the right).
It is true that even by Trump's standards, the literal destruction of the White House is an unusually brazen demonstration of Caligula's impunity. Yet, as has happened so often over the last decade of the MAGA-branded plunder of our public sphere, critics in and around the house of liberalism continue to snort and chafe at the specter of Trump simply being Trump, that is, using every resource at his disposal to further his own crass and corrupt self-interest. In other words, Trump continues to turn constitutional governance into a bogus implementation system because our political order no longer supports any viable theory of corruption as a product of the executive branch.
Not so long ago, such a huge blind spot in American politics would have been unthinkable. The Watergate scandal and the perhaps more damning findings of the Church Committee. investigation into abuses in the US intelligence communityCombined with the destructive legacy of the Vietnam War, this created a healthy reaction of public opinion against what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the imperial presidency. But now many of the most important pillars of that time to check executive power and fight corruption, such as Water Control Act 1974 And War Powers Resolution 1973became virtually meaningless as the American republic became an autocratic plaything. And don't get me started US intelligence abuses.
This shift is not driven solely by Trumpism. The central factor was the campaigning practice of the Roberts Court, which long before Trump took office abandoned the entire concept of corruption in the country. landmark decisions for example, 2010s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Following the standard established there, the court proceeded to consider deregulate virtually any monetary attack on good governmentuntil the recipient of the payment declares loudly on the bank deposit line: “I am transferring the proceeds of the bribe today.”
In many ways, this is the background to Trump's hostile takeover of first the Republican Party and then our government as a whole, and what lies behind the grim saga of the White House demolition. Trump is funding the ballroom with huge donations from major corporate donors; The White House fundraising dinner on October 15 featured firms including Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as a group of reliably corrupt NFL owners. Alphabet, Google's parent company, also received compensation of $22 million about Trump's frivolous lawsuit against YouTube (which is also owned by Alphabet) for banning him from the platform following the January 6 coup attempt. “I view this huge ballroom as an ethical nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House. told the BBC. “They're using access to the White House to raise money… All these corporations want something from the government.” It's true: The scale and scope of executive branch corruption reached such a degree that it outraged the veteran White House ethics officer, who launched a warrantless illegal invasion, sanctioned torture, and handpicked John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
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Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders have been noticeably slow to connect the dots in such scandals. This is not surprising given that the opposition party in Washington enjoys enormous support from the same corrupt corporate oligarchy that powers Trump. This is a lesson that can be learned from any look at the past. list of donors for Kamala Harris' 2024 campaign and her large-scale economic program. Indeed, at an inopportune moment, on the same day that the demolition of Trump's East Wing began, news broke that the Democratic National Committee paid off another $1.6 million in debt due to Harris' record $1.5 billion campaign failure, bringing total post-campaign cleanup costs to $20 million, which the party is effectively sacrificing for more productive uses in the 2026 midterm cycle. The GOP's MAGA money crusade to destroy civil society was more egregious and carried out at a higher level of symbolic outrage.
Hence the high-flown rhetoric about Trump's crude personal attacks on the “people's home”; the interests arising from this particular work of destruction are not forces which no major party can afford to alienate. This is why each new restriction of MAGA civil rights is treated as a new crime committed, and not as part of an all-too-simple expansion of a corrupt ideology. So in the same damn news cycle this week it's reported that Trump demand another $230 million (he clearly prefers the hefty 12-figure sums) from the Justice Department as “compensation” for damages caused by judicial investigations into his transfer of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and possible Russian influence on his 2016 campaign. He, without bothering to offer even a remotely plausible explanation, pardoned expelled New York congressman and convicted fraudster George Santos. And he extended his campaign of murder on the high seas to ship in the pacific oceanagain allegedly involved in drug trafficking without any credible public evidence of the accusation (not that such a crime would justify it anyway campaign of extrajudicial killings carried out by the US military).
The same fundamental point of view drives all this self-serving behavior and destruction; indeed, even Trump's reckless physical attack on the White House is consistent with his long-standing search of the Bonwit Teller building and the destruction of the Art Deco murals he had promised to protect in order to erect Trump Tower, the first huge, ugly monument to his insatiable ego. It is not difficult to analyze this mentality; all you need is a political system that can call it by its real name.
