Trump plans $1 billion extreme home makeover. When he's gone, we'll undo all of it.
Report reveals that administration has secretly moved staggering amounts of money from other agencies to help the president redecorate the White House.
Donald Trump is carrying out a far more sweeping renovation of the White House than was previously known. You are paying for it. And he might be breaking the law in the process.
While you were out buying the groceries Trump promised to make cheaper, his administration quietly assembled nearly a billion dollars to gild the president’s mansion, most of it from taxpayer funds. According to confidential contracting documents reviewed by the Washington Post, the White House has stockpiled money for at least $927 million in construction on the grounds, the most expensive overhaul of the property in its history in raw dollars. And Trump didn’t ask Congress for it.
To do it, analysis shows the Trump administration secretly raided funding from other agencies and accounts, including $415 million that was appropriated by Congress in part to recruit and train the Secret Service agents who take bullets for presidents. Instead, that money is being redirected to buy him a ballroom and pay for other renovations that haven’t been fully disclosed to the American people or Congress.
The mechanics of how the White House is doing this are just as damning as the number. The administration apparently routed the funds through the “Executive Residence,” the small housekeeping office that employs the White House curators, calligraphers, and carpenters. Its maintenance account normally receives about $2.5 million a year from Congress. Since Trump took office, his aides have stuffed $875 million into it, including $500 million in transfers from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, money donated from corporations and wealthy individuals connected to the president, and another $70 million from sources the documents don’t identify.
Why launder the money through the housekeepers? I’ll tell you. Because that office is exempt from ordinary federal disclosure rules. The contracts are typically confidential. In theory, this is partly to protect the president and the White House complex against threat actors. But it’s definitely not so the commander-in-chief can put together unauthorized passion projects with taxpayer funds and avoid public criticism. That’s why last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled against part of Trump’s scheme, finding that the White House evaded accountability by trying to build the ballroom without congressional approval. Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.
I spent years working on the House Appropriations Committee, so let me explain the legal architecture that Donald Trump seems to be treating as a suggestion. The power of the purse belongs to Congress. It’s the first power the Constitution grants, in Article One, and it means the executive branch cannot take money lawmakers appropriated for one purpose and spend it on another, not without explicit approval. When Congress declined to fund Trump’s ballroom, that was basically their answer. They didn’t also say, “But you can take the money from other places!” The president evidently didn’t like his restrictions.
By moving Secret Service training money into a redecorating account, he may be committing the same species of offense he was impeached for the first time. Remember when Trump defied Congress’s direction on funds for Ukraine — and dangled the money as a quid-pro-quo, with demands that Ukraine investigate his political rival, Joe Biden? That, of course, wasn’t an “authorized” purpose of those funds. It was a high crime, one for which he was then investigated and impeached.
Trump clearly didn’t learn his lesson. He’s back at it again.
One thing I can say with certainty is that the investigations into this will be sweeping. House Democrats are already sending document-preservation letters to the companies financing and building one part of this project — the ballroom — and if voters hand them the gavel in November, they will almost certainly expand that investigation into all aspects of the Trump administration’s spending schemes. Right now, he appears to be moving money into special accounts to allow himself to do an extreme home makeover that no one gave him the power to carry out.
As they say, follow the money.
But when I read the Washington Post report, I felt like another message needed to be delivered to Trump and his family. They needed to be told to stop treating our government like their own cheap casino, and they also needed to be notified that their attempt to literally etch their legacies into our buildings, cities, and society will fail.
So let me tell Trump, right now, what he needs to hear:
Everything you are doing is temporary.
You are a mere renter behaving like an owner, which you are not. And the moment you are gone, the demolition will begin.
We will take down the ugly drapes and the gold trim.
We will take down the gaudy flourishes in the Oval Office and the embarrassing Walk of Fame along the colonnade.
We will unpave the Rose Garden and let it bloom again.
If the ballroom ever rises, we will tear it down the same way you tore down the East Wing, except we will do it legally.
We will take your face off the $1 coins, pull them from circulation, and melt them down while we remove your signature from paper currency.
We will strip your name from TrumpRx and Trump Accounts, pull the banner-sized portraits off federal buildings, and cancel the planned triumphal arch before a single stone is laid.
If we’re too late, we’ll tear that down, too.
And when it’s all said and done, we’ll erase your likeness from every place it didn’t belong, from the park passes all the way down to the stationery.
You are wasting your time and wasting our money… because we will undo the entirety of your corrupt legacy. Do you understand?
Autocratic rulers stamp their names and faces onto the state because they know their legacy cannot survive on the merits. And many of them would rather die infamous and reviled than fade into obscurity. In that same spirit, Donald Trump is trying to make himself permanent by fusing his noxious brand with the republic so that removing him feels like removing America. Well, it won’t work. This country has defied better-built cults than his (ask the British monarchy), and the statues always come down.
To show him what that will look like, we made a video earlier this year imagining January 21, 2029, the day his name starts coming off of everything. I’ve included it below. If this looks like a mere movie trailer to you, don’t worry. The full-length, documentary film will be a masterpiece.
Your friend, in defiance,
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