Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell has a bold plan for what his party should do if it takes back power in 2028: Bulldoze President Trump’s new ballroom!
Seriously, I’m not making this up. He recently wrote on X: “Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE.”
He got some well-deserved pushback for this unhinged tweet, and so followed it up with a comment that it should at least be renamed “the Barack Obama Ballroom.” At least that wouldn’t involve literally destroying something just for pure spite.
But it’s telling that Swalwell’s initial impulse was to tear down what Trump has built: a new ballroom, where the White House’s East Wing used to stand. Swalwell speaks for many, many Democrats, who are throwing conniption fits over the renovation — they’ve been shrieking about it for over a week now.
As I’ve patiently tried to remind my friends on the left, every single presidential administration has made changes to the White House, some of them just as extreme or more extreme than what Trump is doing. The East Wing isn’t even historical, it was a later addition. And the entire White House interior was torn down in the 1940s, during the Truman administration, and then massively remodeled by first lady Jackie Kennedy in the 1960s. Presidents have added bowling lanes, a computer room a basketball court. Now it’s Trump’s turn, and he’s adding a much needed ballroom, which will allow not just this president but any future president to host state dinners for a larger number of guests.
Let me be perfectly clear: There is nothing — nothing — inappropriate about any of this. And yet Democrats and the mainstream media are having a full meltdown. Bluesky, the social media site preferred by liberal Democrats, is brimming with fury and apoplexy from the Dems.
Commentator Molly Jong Fast wrote a post naming and shaming the companies that donated to the ballroom fund, which is if anything a reminder that this endeavor is being paid for privately rather than by the taxpayers, which should be considered good news.
The Mueller, She Wrote account speculated that perhaps the “priceless items in the East Wing” were still there as the building was demolished.
And Elizabeth Warren has tweeted non-stop about how furious she is, but she isn’t just tweeting — she also plans to open an investigation into the renovation.
Of course, that’s her entire ideology in a nutshell: call yourself a progressive and use government bureaucracy to slow development and thwart actual progress.
But I digress. What’s actually going on here is that liberal hatred of Trump drives them to love everything he is against, and oppose everything he is for. So even though the average Democrat, much like the average American, had no special fondness for the East Wing, because Trump has torn it down, they must pretend they care deeply about it. Thus newspaper headlines like this one: “The East Wing is gone. Here’s why it’s been called the heart of the nation.”
The heart of the nation? By who? As my friend Payton Alexander writes on X: “It’s incredible how he makes them say things like this. They’ve completely lost the plot.”
I can’t say it any better than Glenn Greenwald: “The unhinged and hysterical rage over Trump’s remodeling of the old, outdated, crusty East Wing is the type of reflexive anti-Trump meltdown that has so often made valid criticism of him fall on deaf ears. Classic boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome.”
Credit to The Washington Post, a mainstream newspaper that nevertheless published an op-ed declaring that Trump was right to renovate the White House and build a ballroom. The Post only laments that new construction is so much more difficult if you’re not the president of the United States, who can wave away many onerous government requires that make development so costly and time consuming.
The Post writes: “The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”
Amen.
Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.