• 39 Posts
  • 431 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: January 20th, 2025
  • HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.worldOPtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•The 'ol rush job
    1·
    10 days ago

    With Trump, he’ll go out of his way to create opportunities for a grift

    Which is likely what this was originally intended to be, but it also happens to intersect with an opportunity to stroke his ego and get his narcissistic supply by building a monument to himself in the process.

    Of course he’s going to prioritize and fast track such a project

  • HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.worldOPtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•The 'ol rush job
    7·
    10 days ago

    Given the preliminary basic design and conceptual failures, it seems highly likely this project is destined for major problems

    Embarrassing Flaws Emerge in Trump’s New White House Design

    Construction on Donald Trump’s controversial new White House addition is off to a disastrous start if his model of the glitzy East Wing ballroom is anything to go by.

    Plans shared by the MAGA administration suggest “a hurried process,” the New York Times reports, noting that a miniature mock-up of the 90,000 square foot annex, proudly unveiled to the press Wednesday, featured some truly bizarre architectural features.

    These include a staircase leading up from the South Lawn directly into a brick wall, and at least two woefully misaligned windows that appear to open out onto one another.

    Demolition of the existing structure, which began Monday, has prompted fierce outcry as cranes and backhoes were seen tearing down sections of exterior cladding and ripping windows off their hinges at one of the most instantly recognizable historic sites on the planet, with the scale of destruction now even visible from space.

    The White House can’t seem to decide how many guests the new ballroom will accommodate, with official estimates ranging from 650 to 1,350 people. Once Trump has flattened the old East Wing, he has toyed with naming the $300 million new venue after himself.

    Though the plans were first announced months ago, backlash to the actual start of construction has been swift. Critics, like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, have lamented what they describe as the president treating the physical structure of the nation’s highest office as if it was his own personal backyard.

    “To take literally a wrecking ball to the White House… it’s grotesque, just grotesque!” the Morning Joe host said Tuesday. “It’s not yours! You rent it from the American people for four years.”

    Others have compared the Trump administration’s work on the building, which the president had previously promised would leave the existing structures untouched, to ISIS’s desecration of historic sites and artifacts during the terrorist group’s brutal reign across parts of Syria and Iraq.

    “The first reaction I had was, what the f—? It’s not OK. The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump—it’s a federal building, a taxpayer building, belonging to the American people,” archaeologist Matthew Vincent, who spent two decades documenting the recovery of artifacts looted by the Islamic extremist movement, told the Daily Beast.

    “What he’s doing is horrific and done without any oversight or acknowledgment from the bodies that should oversee this—and certainly not with the American people,” he added.

    The NYT says Trump has indeed failed to follow established procedure for renovations on White House grounds, bypassing the usual reviews from federal groups like the National Capital Planning Commission.