Trump’s Big, Hideous Ballroom
Even with everything else going on, some crimes against taste are too outrageous to ignore.
Some not-great news on the jobs front this morning. The economy added 73,000 jobs in July, far below the expected 110,000. Worse: There were some serious revisions downward for the prior two months. May went from 144,000 jobs added to 19,000; June went from 147,000 jobs added to 14,000. We expect Trump to declare that this is Joe Biden’s economy now.
Mercifully, we can distract ourselves from this shaky economic news with this interesting story from the BBC about oh God, oh man, oh yikes—
A radioactive wasp nest with radiation levels ten times of what is allowed under regulations was found at a facility that once produced parts for US nuclear weapons, federal officials said.
“The wasp nest was sprayed to kill wasps, then bagged as radioactive waste,” says a US Department of Energy report released last week. No wasps were found at the site near Aiken in South Carolina.
CNN hastened to add that “officials said there is no danger to anyone”—leaving unsaid the obvious exception of unless you happen to get stung by one of these bad boys. Happy Friday.
One Big Beautiful Ballroom
by William Kristol
I know, I know. No one likes a party pooper. No one welcomes a finger wagger. No one likes an old grouch.
I try to remind myself of this every now and then. Because it’s hard not to be all of these things in the age of Trump. The unfortunate epoch in which we find ourselves provides so many opportunities for one’s inner Eeyore, one’s barely suppressed Debbie Downer, one’s sublimated-with-difficulty censorious moralizer, to break out.
Donald Trump wants to knock down the fine old East Wing of the White House and replace it with a giant ballroom. That’s too kind. Really, he’s turning the stately White House into Mar-a-Lago North! It should be called the Juan and Eva Peron Ballroom! As a friend remarked, it looks like Versailles took a giant dump on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here in America, ballrooms should be in hotels, not in the People’s House! Oh, for the good old days of democratic dignity and republican restraint!
And I would add, at the risk of turning this newsletter into House & Garden, that now the White House has a nicely balanced look, with a West Wing and an East Wing flanking its central structure. Trump wants to destroy that. And how nicely old-fashioned and modest those simple names were: the West Wing and East Wing! How soon will they be sacrificed in the cause of “naming opportunities?”
I could go on. I want to go on! It’s vulgar! It’s distasteful! It’s a sad sign of our distempered times!
But I won’t go on. I will show strength of character.
Of course, I should also acknowledge reality. The East Wing as we know it has only existed since 1942, when it was added by Franklin D. Roosevelt to cover the construction of an underground bunker. The First Lady has only had offices there since 1977. The West Wing, which it so elegantly balances, is itself an early-twentieth-century addition.
I take the point. I will lighten up.
Vulgarity is endemic to democracy. And it’s particularly endemic now, to a democracy that twice elected Donald Trump. The One Big Beautiful Ballroom is the least of the damaging legacies he’s going to leave us. Compared to the real damage he’s doing to our polity and our society—compared to all the indecency and illegality, this is a mere footnote, and a minor one at that.
What, after all, is a mere garish ballroom when Trump evades the truth about and minimizes the horror of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein? Who cares about a tsunami of gold Chiavari chairs when we watch his FBI Director lie as he claims newly discovered documents proved the claim of Russian interference in the 2016 election was an invention of Democrats?
All of this makes one want to say of Donald Trump what Abraham Lincoln said in 1858 about Stephen Douglas’s apparent moral neutrality on the institution of slavery: “He is blowing out the moral lights around us. . . . he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty [in] the public mind.”
Hold on! You’re overdoing it! No more moralizing!
I’ve got to lighten up.
But, my God. I can’t. Did you see that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has named today, August 1, Hulk Hogan Day? “In honor of a great Floridian, Hulk Hogan, we are lowering the flags at the capitol and in Pinellas County tomorrow. Additionally, I am officially declaring tomorrow, August 1st, 2025, as ‘Hulk Hogan Day’ in Florida.”
How many Floridians have done notable things to help their neighbors and their country? How many Floridians have real achievements in science, in the arts, in civic life? “Hulk Hogan Day”? Really? That’s what we’ve come to?
It appears so. Maybe, in fact, that’s what we’ve always been, to some degree.
And I should husband my outrage for the “Alligator Alcatraz,” where people are being mistreated as a result of truly cruel and indecent policies. That’s a real disgrace to our county. “Hulk Hogan” day is kind of harmless, I guess.
OK, so I’ll let Hulk Hogan go by without comment. No finger wagging.
But still, there are lines I can not cross, and crimes I can’t countenance. And they extend to the world of civic architecture. I must say—once more for the record—that I am horrified and appalled by Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Ballroom.
An Appeal to Smooth Brains
by Andrew Egger
Put yourself in the shoes of a specific kind of voter. You spend a lot of time half-paying attention to right-wing political content—sipping a slurry of it through a straw in your social-media scroll, idly marinating in it on Fox News or YouTube. You don’t read much news—all the media does is lie anyway, right?—so you’re not brushing up too much on any policy area or story. What you’re developing instead is a particular set of half-considered impulses toward the world: that dastardly elites in general and the Democratic party in particular are the source of all ills, that they have spent years worming their way into and desecrating our national institutions, and that the Trump administration is currently engaged in the heroic work of purging.
These are the Americans the White House has seemingly had in mind during its recent series of histrionic “revelations” about supposed Democratic malfeasance around the 2016 investigations into Russian election meddling. Again and again, officials have followed the same pattern: declassifying documents, then taking to a briefing podium or social media to lie heroically about their contents, all while counterintuitively inviting voters to read them for themselves.
The latest example came last night, when FBI Director Kash Patel took to X to proclaim a shocking new discovery: a July 2016 email suggesting Hillary Clinton and her campaign had planned the whole Russia-collusion thing from the start. The email, supposedly written by George Soros lieutenant Leonard Bernardo, states that “HRC” [Hillary Clinton] had “approved” an aide’s idea “about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.” It went on:
This should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level. The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel menace since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledged the fact IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable.
“We uncovered this annex, along with thousands of other documents, buried in a back room at the FBI,” Patel claimed. Patel also retweeted a claim from Charlie Kirk that the documents had been found “in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a secret room inside the FBI.”
It’s a striking story. The email is striking, too. There’s just one little issue: It appears to be a forgery, as the very documents declassified by Patel show.
The documents in question are files prepared by John Durham, the special counsel Trump appointed in 2020 to scrutinize, yes, the origins of the Russia probe. (What a lot of scrutinizing that probe has gotten by now!) In his report, which he released in 2023, Durham discussed how the U.S. had obtained these files from Russian intelligence. He and his team tried to verify the Clinton emails that Patel is now currently trumpeting. But they couldn’t. Durham ultimately concluded himself that Russian intelligence had likely faked them.
Durham used these discoveries to make a point about the inherent untrustworthiness of files with such an origin. His argument was that the initial Russiagate investigators should have been more skeptical of files with questionable origins, like the infamous Steele dossier.
Patel and his media allies have abandoned that skepticism. Worse, they’ve decided to use the (likely) Russian disinformation as a cudgel to drum up calls for the prosecution of Obama, Clinton and others.
This is the clown world we’re living in. What Team Trump is doing with these documents is literally what they have accused others of doing to them all along: lying about the reliability of intelligence for nakedly partisan reasons.
Which raises the question: Why release the documents at all? Why not just keep them classified while lying about what they say, to make it impossible for the public to check their work?
The answer likely lies in who they’re actually talking to: the type of voter I mentioned above. The White House knows its intended audience isn’t actually going to take the time to personally sift through declassified intelligence reports. But that audience is going to be titillated by hearing about Trump bringing hidden files to light—particularly once you throw in all that stuff about “burn bags” and secret rooms. What were they trying to hide, they’ll think to themselves, never bothering to figure out if that question has an actual answer. Must’ve been something pretty bad, is all.
It’s a remarkably low opinion for the White House to have of its own voters. But that doesn’t mean it’s an inaccurate one.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Bizarre DHS Social-Media Strategy: Something to White Home About… Contempt, cruelty, and weaponized sentimentality is the point, writes DOUGLAS SACKMAN.
Trump is Facing a Major Judicial Backlash… GEORGE CONWAY explains to JVL the Trump Epstein fixation, secret DOJ meetings, and a growing judicial backlash. He also explains how Emil Bove’s confirmation could reshape the courts for decades.
Senators Tried to Tamp Down Corruption. Trump Got Pissed… In Press Pass, JOE PERTICONE reports on which Republicans suffered Trump’s wrath, and a bonus: Democrats have a new path to get the government’s Epstein files.
Hilarious Stories of Humiliation and Sadness… Even while exploring how the internet warps us, Tony Tulathimutte’s novel Rejection never loses its humanistic sensibility, writes ADAM FLEMING PETTY.
Quick Hits
LIBERATION DAY 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Well, here come the tariffs again! After spending the last few months haggling over bilateral deals with various countries, the White House on Thursday unveiled its latest plans for rates for everybody else. Plenty of countries saw tariff rate reductions relative to the eye-watering numbers unveiled on “Liberation Day” back in April. But compared to pre-Trump levels, rates remain significantly up across the board, with a baseline minimum of 10 percent everywhere. The era in which America was a global cheerleader for more and freer international trade is over. “The president has essentially reordered global trade,” a White House official briefed reporters Thursday night. No kidding!
The rest of the world is scrambling to adjust to that new order. As the New York Times notes, it isn’t just their own rates that our various trading partners care about—it’s how their rates compare to their competitors’. Here’s the Times:
South Korea, while not happy with its 15 percent tariff, was relieved that it at least was at the same level as the European Union and Japan. “Compared to the period before Trump, the situation is worse,” said Kyong Hyun Koo, a trade economist at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. “But what matters is the relative export price for Korean companies, so we can sell our products to the U.S. market at a cheaper price compared to our competitors. In that sense, I can say it’s not bad.”
THE REAL VICTIM HERE: It’s interesting—encouraging, even—that Donald Trump has apparently developed a newfound concern for the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians. He reiterated that concern at the White House yesterday in response to a question from Real Clear Politics’s Phil Wegmann. “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that what’s occurring there is a genocide,” Wegmann asked. “Do you agree?”
Trump replied:
Oh, it’s terrible what’s occurring there, yeah. It’s a terrible thing. People are very hungry. You know, the United States gave $60 million for food. And it’s a shame, because nobody—I don’t see the results of it. And we gave it to people that in theory are watching over it fairly closely. We wanted Israel to watch over it. Part of the problem is Hamas is taking the money and they’re taking the food. But we gave $60 million a couple weeks ago. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody said ‘thank you.’ But I didn’t need the thank you. I just wanted the people to get fed. And we’re helping out financially with that situation. It’s a terrible situation.
There’s some fascinating stuff going on here. Naturally, there’s the ridiculous harrumphing about how little credit he’s gotten for the aid the U.S. has given already. Beyond that, though, it’s clear that Trump is at least passingly keyed in on the two main issues facing humanitarian aid in Gaza: Israel’s apparent apathy toward ensuring aid gets distributed, and Hamas’s reported hoarding of aid that does get inside. You even wonder if Trump’s personal vanity might be unexpectedly increasing his attention to this issue. He’s all but saying: If Israel were doing a better job getting the aid in, our contributions to their program would have gotten a bit more credit.
Cheap Shots
I feel like we’re overlooking the obvious here.
This ghastly ballroom is going to take a few years to build.
Fatass clearly wants to waddle around in it.
The only conclusion I can come to us that Fatass isn’t planning on leaving.
The next Democratic president should turn the White House ballroom into a museum of corruption, like the Ukrainians did with the Yanukovych residence.