The White House Is Being Destroyed Because Corruption Doesn’t Matter Anymore

It’s long been evident that the MAGA siege on American governance is a glorified wrecking job, but this week’s installment has been just a little too on-the-nose: After pledging not to molest the White House in the process of constructing a $250 million ballroom addition seemingly cribbed from the gaudier reaches of Versailles, President Donald Trump has now approved the demolition of the structure’s entire east wing.

The reckless lurch into gilded ruination has triggered a chorus of denunciations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to Never Trump defenses of “the People’s House” (a characterization undercut considerably by the use of slave labor to build it) to a show of civic dudgeon from former East Wing occupant Hillary Clinton (which provoked just as predictable bouts of outrage from the right).

It’s true that, even by Trump’s standards, the literal destruction of the White House is an unusually brazen show of Caligulan impunity. Yet as has been so often the case over the past decade of MAGA-branded pillaging of our public sphere, critics in and around the house of liberalism are left sputtering and huffing before the specter of Trump simply being Trump—which is to say, leveraging every resource at his disposal to promote his own crass and venal self-interest. Put another way, Trump continues to downgrade constitutional governance into a backsheesh delivery system because our political order no longer sustains any viable theory of corruption as an outgrowth of executive power.

It wasn’t all that long ago that such a massive blindspot in the American body politic would have been unthinkable. The Watergate scandal, and the arguably more damning findings of the Church committee’s inquiry into abuses in the US intelligence community, together with the Vietnam War’s corrosive legacy, spurred a healthy backlash in public opinion against what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the imperial presidency. But now, many of the most important executive-curbing, corruption-fighting pillars of that time, such as the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and the 1973 War Powers Resolution, have become virtually meaningless as the American republic shrinks into an autocratic plaything. And do not get me started on US intelligence abuses.

This shift is not merely due to Trumpism. A central factor has been the agitprop jurisprudence of the Roberts court, which long before Trump’s ascension had wished away the whole concept of corruption in landmark rulings such as 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Following the standard set there, the court has proceeded to deregulate virtually any moneyed assault on good government, so long as the recipient of a payoff doesn’t loudly announce in a bank-deposit line that “I am transferring the proceeds from my bribe today.”

This is very much the backstory to Trump’s hostile takeover of first the Republican Party and then our government at large—and it is also very much what’s behind the lurid saga of the White House’s demolition. Trump is funding the ballroom’s construction via massive contributions from big corporate donors; an October 15 fundraising dinner at the White House included firms such as Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as a clutch of reliably corrupt NFL owners. Google’s parent company Alphabet has also kicked in a $22 million settlement of Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against YouTube (which Alphabet also owns) for banning him from the platform in the aftermath of the attempted coup on January 6. “I view this enormous ballroom as an ethics nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House told the BBC. “It’s using access to the White House to raise money…. These corporations all want something from the government.” That’s right: The sheer scale and volume of executive corruption has accelerated to the point where it has scandalized an ethics veteran from the White House that launched a baseless illegal invasion, sanctioned torture, and handpicked John Roberts as Supreme Court chief justice.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been notably sluggish in connecting the relevant dots in scandals like this. This is not too surprising when you remember that the opposition party in Washington draws a tremendous amount of backing from the same corrupt corporate oligarchy as Trump. That’s the bracing object lesson supplied by any look back at the donor roster for the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign, and its top-heavy economic program. Indeed, in an awkward bit of timing, the same day that Trump’s east wing demolition began, news broke that the Democratic National Committee retired another $1.6 million in debt from Harris’s record-breaking $1.5 billion failure of a campaign, bringing to $20 million the total post-campaign cleanup spending that the party is effectively sacrificing from more productive use in the 2026 midterm cycle. The MAGA GOP’s moneyed crusade of civic ruination just happens to be more blatant, and executed at a higher level of symbolic outrage.

Hence the high-flown rhetoric, on Trump’s crass personal assault on “the people’s house”; the interests springing for this particular wrecking job aren’t forces that either major party can afford to alienate. This is also why each new MAGA enclosure of the civic commons is treated as its own freshly perpetrated outrage, rather than as part of an all-too plain extension of a corruptionist ideology. So in this week’s same accursed news cycle, Trump is also reported to demand another $230 million (he clearly favors nice round 12-figure sums) from the Department of Justice as “damages” for the harms wrought by legal investigations into his transfer of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and possible Russian influence over his 2016 campaign. He has, without bothering to offer a remotely plausible explanation, pardoned the expelled New York congressman and convicted fraudster George Santos. And he’s extended his campaign of murder on the high seas to a ship in the Pacific, once again alleged to be involved with drug trafficking without any credible public proof of the charge (not that such a crime would, in any event, justify a campaign of extrajudicial murder carried out by the US military).

The same fundamental outlook drives all of this self-dealing and wreckage; indeed, even Trump’s reckless physical assault of the White House is of a piece with his long-ago ransacking of the Bonwit Teller building and his destruction of art deco frescoes he pledged to protect, in order to erect Trump Tower, the first great ugly monument to his insatiable ego. It’s not a hard mentality to dissect; all you need is a political system that’s able to call it by its true name.