Years ago, when my aunt was diagnosed with cancer, my parents jumped in to help. They bought a condo across the street from her house in Ohio so my mother could drive in from Pennsylvania on weekends to help care for her.
It was to be a temporary living situation until my aunt was back on her feet. Unfortunately, my aunt passed quickly, and my parents were stuck with the condo, so rather than give it up, they decided to make it their permanent home.
They gutted it, tore down walls, replaced the floors, and added a patio, among other things. Slowly, lovingly, they made it theirs, and settled in for good.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, making something that was supposed to be temporary permanent..
When I see what Donald Trump is doing to the White House in his second term, I can’t help but think of my parents’ renovations. The difference, of course, is that theirs was done out of love and loss. Trump’s is being done out of ego and permanence. He’s remaking the People’s House into a dictator’s palace.
In the past, the president-elect moves some furniture from a private residence to the White House living quarters, which is how every other president has sought to make the White House more of a home for four years, but not Trump. He is brazenly moving in for good, right under our noses.
What is supposed to be a temporary home for the president of the United States in this case is being turned into a permanent residence. It’s being transformed into Trump’s fortress, the place where he wishes to stay indefinitely as a dictator. At some point, he will build a mausoleum.
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This is not metaphorical or hyperbole. He’s literally rebuilding the White House to look and feel like a cheap Mar-a-Lago knockoff. He’s covered the walls with gilded gold leaf and put in new, obscene chandeliers and draperies. It is embarrassing to all of us with a sense of decorum to see world leaders sit there surrounded by gold plate and aureate.
What he did to the Rose Garden was despicable. The Rose Garden was something Jackie Kennedy did with her sense of style, beauty, and abundance of care. She built it to provide beauty and solace outside the Oval Office, which can become the world’s biggest pressure cooker.
It was once a symbol of modest grace and democracy in bloom. Trump ripped it up and replaced it with marble patio slabs, where Trump now holds court like a bloated bloviator. The new set-up is reminiscent of his outdoor patio at Mar-a-Lago where he DJ’s from his table.
To Trump, concrete is more beautiful than budding roses. He has zero sense of beauty.
And the welcoming East Wing, where visitors have entered the White House for decades, and which has historically been the home to the first lady’s offices and causes, has been demolished.
Grossly, he’s building what he’s calling “The Grand Ballroom of Freedom,” a grotesque, high-ceilinged echo chamber designed only for him. Because Trump never does anything for anyone else.
That’s how I know this is his overt signaling that he’s staying for good. Trump only does things to benefit Trump. And all of these changes are how dictators settle in and stay.
And it’s not just in the decor but also in the deeds. Trump has long admired strongmen who outlived their terms, who manipulated laws, constitutions, and armies to ensure they’d never leave office. His second term has become a master class in how to make democracy look like it still exists while hollowing it out from within.
He’s militarized the streets of Washington and elsewhere, armored vehicles on Constitution Avenue, drones circling over protests, federal forces on city streets, answering not to governors or mayors but to him personally.
He’s using the Justice Department as a weapon, ordering the prosecution of political rivals and even private citizens who’ve criticized him or dared write or speak out about him.
And he has the gall, the absolute filthy gall, to want the Justice Department to pay him $230 million for investigating him. Cancel that. It’s not the DOJ that would pay him. You would pay him. Taxpayers would pay him.
And he’s literally building another legacy in golden, gaudy, permanent walls.
On his 79th birthday, Trump threw himself a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. He stood pathetically atop a pithy reviewing stand. All of it cost millions of dollars that Congress never approved. But guess what. You paid for it. You paid for this dictator to fluff his ego.
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Qatar “gifted” him a luxury private jet, a flying palace outfitted with gold fixtures and a grand staircase. Air Force One has always been a dignified representation of the United States of America. Trump’s new luxury aircraft will just underscore his lavish dictatorship.
All of this is happening at a breakneck pace. Americans are being whipped to a frenzy by the daily, if not hourly, attempts by Trump to establish himself as a dictator. .
And beneath the surface of all the official “acts,” all the renovations, every gold ornament, every marble slab, every gutted room in the White House feels like a claim of ownership by Trump. I told someone the other day that he’s liable to turn the Oval Office into a rectangle, and they laughed.
I wasn’t joking.
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Just as democracy is slipping away or really has slipped away, so too the People’s House, It’s quickly feeling like it's no longer ours. It’s his mansion now, stripped, gutted, gilded, and locked from the inside.
The parallels are everywhere, from Putin’s gilded palaces to Turkey’s Erdoğan’s 1,100-room presidential complex. Trump is building his own Versailles but without Louis XIV's taste. His renovations are physical expressions of his political intent to make the presidency and therefore the White House synonymous with himself.
Years from now, historians may study these architectural choices as evidence not just of corruption but Trump’s psychological hijacking of every shred of American democracy. Every wall he tears down is another boundary, legal, moral, or democratic, that he refuses to respect.
Watching a crane demolish the East Wing was sickening.
I think back to my parents’ condo again, how they made it a home, how they filled it with love and purpose. That’s what people do when they mean to stay. They build for the long term. They invest. They decorate. They make it theirs.
Trump is doing the same, only his long term is forever, and without love. Without care. And without freedom for all of us.
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