On Friday’s Washington Week with The Atlantic, moderator Jeffrey Goldberg devoted 14 minutes -- over half the show’s 22-minute discussion time -- to the East Wing demolition undertaken by President Trump, using private funding, in order to build a much-needed White House ballroom.
After the introduction, where Goldberg complained “President Trump this week took a wrecking ball to the East Wing of the White House, and in so doing, obliterated the line between metaphor and literal reality,” he did an extended bit on the demolition, riffing like a weathercaster in front of the now-outdated Washington Week backdrop.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to start with an apology. We pride ourselves here in our accuracy, but we realized very late in the day that our backdrop is no longer correct because it still features the East Wing of the White House. Let me show you where it used to be. So, this right here, that was the that was the East Wing. Now it's a hole. That's just a hole next to the White House over here. That's the West Wing that's still standing, as far as we know, although I'm not there right now to prove it.
Then he decided to play comedian about the screen behind him: "In the back here, you got the -- that's the Empire State Building. And over there that's LAX. And also we have we got a cold front moving in from Ohio. So, break out your sweaters." He even said he would fix things when PBS gets their government funding back.
Then the tongue-in-check segment ended. When Goldberg returned to the roundtable things got deadly serious.
PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Washington's a historic city. And if you try to change your door or your front yard in a lot of different parts of the city, you would have to go through a whole, big, bureaucratic process that would take months and months and months. Not if you're president of the United States, it turns out. You just call a demolition company from Maryland, you get them down there and whack away without tell anybody or asking.
Before criticizing Trump’s "unilateral decision," Baker admitted that he has a point: “It's true, the State Dining Room only seats about 140 people, and presidents in the last few years have been using the South Lawn, putting a big cathedral tent there because it isn't big enough -- fair enough.”
Toluse Olorunnipa, who works for Goldberg at The Atlantic, lamented seeing the East Wing (which lacks the historical heft of the West Wing) “defaced and deconstructed in a matter of three days was really shocking to the conscience of a lot of people.” When Goldberg asked his employee to explain why Congress wasn’t rebelling over Trump’s architectural atrocity, Olorunnipa considered “the 250 years of this country's history going back to the Declaration of Independence,” and complained Republicans weren’t speaking out against their own president.
When Goldberg asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, “What does that sort of thing do to the presidency itself?” Ignatius responded with saddened contempt.
DAVID IGNATIUS: It demeans. It takes it to a level of vulgarity and crassness. You know, it demeans our country in the eyes of the world. I find more and more of my friends from other countries look at this behavior with a kind of revulsion, it's just, it's not the America that they understand, but it's just not -- it's not appropriate behavior.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat marshaled arguments in favor of Trump’s move: “Why Trump’s East Wing Demolition Needed to Happen.”
No doubt there was a more careful and sensitive way to pursue the project. But exquisite care and sensitivity are part of the reason that, in so many liberal-leaning jurisdictions, apartment towers, power plants and high-speed rail lines vanish into developmental limbo. It’s just a small example of why Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach appeals; the president’s eagerness to pre-empt objections and just do something that seems necessary is part of why voters find him attractive.
It's an alternative point of view, and not even a particularly pro-Trump one, that is nonetheless absent from the Jeffrey Goldberg scheme that is Washington Week.
