Donald Trump, Master Builder of Castles in the Air

The fact that Donald Trump would end up shouting Washington roofs is not, in itself, everything that surprised; that he actually did it and not only metaphorically was a bit of a shock. “Sir, why are you on the roof?” A journalist asked, when the president suddenly appeared outside at high level of the White House this week. “Make a walk,” replied the president. The unusual photo has captured Trump, accompanied by its architect, in the survey on High Howis its ball hall of two hundred miles and eighty thousand square feet, to be built in place of the wing is current, will transform the executive campus. He may also have wanted a view of the newly Trumpified Garden pink, the iconic green space designed by Bunny Mellon, who was recently paved in a “very white” stone on Trump’s orders. The president has not yet demanded that his name be wooded on the last additions to the White House complex, but would someone be amazed if he did it? Truman has a balcony; Trump’s ballroom will be larger, Gaudier and it is sure to predict, much more golden.

The controversy on the gargantuan waist of the project, the obscene price and the dubious aesthetics was inevitable – it cuts research on cancer but is built a sticky ballroom? If Democrats cannot capitalize on this politically, they should ask Trump advice on bankruptcy. But what marked me in the official announcement of the White House on the construction project is its relatively short period. “It should be completed well before the end of President Trump’s mandate,” the statement said. Maybe it was bad, but I took this like good news-a sign, perhaps, that he really planned to leave? “It will be an excellent inherited project,” promised Trump, which sounded encouraging someone thinking about life after the office. An alternative theory, however, is just as plausible: that the president, still the real estate pitchman, had insisted to publicly announce an unrealistic deadline for construction.

A few days after revealing the project, which would be the biggest addition to the complex since Teddy Roosevelt built the West wing, at the beginning of the 20th century, Trump gave an interview to CNBC, in which he was questioned in leaving the office at the end of his second mandate, in 2029. Amendment, which limits the presidents on two conditions. Heaps of “Trump 2028” goods on his website attest to the fact that at least his fundraising team still thinks that there is a chance that it will happen. But on Tuesday, the president said that he would “probably” try to run again. Later in the day, when they were asked for possible successors, he got closer that before the JD Vance anointing as his apparent theoretical heir, qualifying the vice-president the candidate “most likely” and “probably preferred” in 2028. Another sign, perhaps, of Trump starting along the long and slow pivot in the inherited mode.

Now that he has rendered his plans for the public White House, they have made me perfectly. The marbled rooms and the golden pillars carrying his personal buffer were always going to be the kind of presidential accomplishment which counted the most for the master of Mar-A-Lago-so many others that he promised to make, after all, on the fantastic air castles that he is so skilful to ward off with his fanfaron. I have no doubt that he can cajolate a few hundred million dollars for his addition of the White House of various billionaires and applicants for business rents who will see their donations probably uncluttered as a low price to pay for any access and regulatory decline they are looking for with his administration. I also have no doubt that Trump will approve, sooner or later, some or all the various bills presented at Congress by Republican members who seek to rename everything from John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts at Washington Dulles International Airport in his honor. It is a man who put his name on the coverage of the Bible in order to sell them copies; Of course, he will want it to be chiselled on as many Washington monuments as possible.

Trump’s real heritage, however, will be much more difficult to secure. He has, in a immodesty manner, promised to personally provide an end to the most crisp conflicts in the world and a transformation of the global economy in more favorable terms in the United States. He insisted that consumer prices would plunge the second where he took office and that energy prices would drop fifty percent in the eighteen months after his return to power. He suggested transforming Canada into fifty and, first state and that Gaza will become a great new Riviera. What happens when, inevitably, it falls very short or, worse, triggers the economic crisis and the authoritarian backlash that its criticisms fear that we are directed?

As I write this, the hundredth day of his second term, Trump’s radical rates entered into force on dozens of countries, news that he praised with a publication of social media and bubbling: “It’s midnight !!! billions of dollars in prices are now in the United States of America!” I will let economists explain why, rather than a new era of gold, the prices could well announce the start of a new hellish era of stagflation and national debt. But we all know that, despite the facts, the pitchman will never stop pitching. Wednesday, while receiving a golden tribute – literally – from the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, Trump had a message on the economic renovation of the heaps he ordered: growth, he insisted, will be “unprecedented”.

But in truth, Trump is not a manufacturer; It’s a smasher. His installation as a politician was devoted to imposing himself in opposition to the existing order – then to encourage supporters to help him overthrow him. To all those who still remember January 6, 2021, it is not only a metaphor. And this also applies to his approach to the development of policies: since his return to his functions, Trump has already withdrew from the world climate agreement, has repealed hundreds of federal regulations, has made it possible to reduce the tax rates on companies and rich individuals, and has granted a particular highlighting on the implementation of all that was a priority of his democratic credits Variation of clean energy taxes and promotion of promotion.

The president, whose greatest success of Pre-Washington was to build a New York skills that bears his name, remains “a manufacturer at heart,” said his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in a statement. Reading his words, I thought about these first mandate chimeras that Trump liked to evoke but barely mentions more – the revitalized coal mines, the new steel manufacturing factories and the large and beautiful wall. All are as real today as this construction deadline for adding to the White House. Susie Wiles is wrong: the story of Trump, so far, does not concern what he has built but what he has demolished. It is destruction, and not construction, in which it has excelled, in a mandate defined by the blowing of standards, rules, laws and conventions that have regulated the presidency for decades. A heritage. ♦