Yesterday, for me, was a mixed visual and reported tableaux. There were the visuals: Donald Trump literally bulldozing about a third of the White House complex. It’s not the main house itself, which goes back more than two centuries, albeit with a rather intense renovation. It’s not the the West Wing where most of the post-war history is. But still, Good lord, he brought in a bulldozer and tore the thing down. Then I saw the news reports that Trump is demanding that his toadies at the Justice Department cut him a check for $230 million. I couldn’t tell whether this was notionally to repay his legal expenses or to compensate him for the tort of being indicted for the crimes for which the Supreme Court let him off the hook. He didn’t seem clear himself. In an impromptu press availability yesterday he said he needed the quarter of a billion for “the fraud of the 2020 election”.
Neither of these things are the worst thing Trump has done in the last 10 months. In fact, from a certain perspective, they pale in comparison to the horrible, existential things that have and are happening in the United States in 2025. Buildings can be rebuilt or replaced. His quarter billion dollar payday pales in comparison to the $40 billion check he’s written for his chainsaw pal in Argentina and the hedgefunders who made bad bets on his pal’s economic reforms. But there is some mix of audacity and symbolism that still put these two moments in new territory. I thought to myself yesterday, how do you top ordering your appointees to cut you a check for $230 million taxpayer dollars. I’ve already seen the first advance troops of normalization trying to tame it, with the New York Times saying it raises potential “conflicts of interest.”
I don’t know how to capture this. What thing can be more unimaginable and beyond belief than the president just saying, Cut me a check for a quarter billion dollars? What can be weirder than his bulldozing a big chunk of the White House?
In a way, it is the very smallness of the acts which put them onto that new ground. Trump is creating a national secret police and paramilitary out of ICE and other policing agencies in the Department of Homeland Security. That’s a pretty huge deal. But I know why he wants to do that. I know why his people want to do that. That’s a cornerstone of the conquest of the American Republic. The ballroom isn’t. That’s just, in Trump’s mind, cool. (In fact, if you listen closely to Trump’s impromptu free-associating remarks which I linked to above in the first paragraph, I think it’s actually possible that the two stories are umbilically connected: Trump’s plan is to get the quarter billion and use “his” money to build the ballroom.)
The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year. There’s no accountability for anything. No limits, no penalties. So the demands keep spiraling. It’s one thing to say that Trump now has deputies that are 100% MAGA and offer none of the pushback or foot-dragging of his first-term team. But this is a next step in the process. When you’ve been living the impunity lifestyle for 10 months, it grows on you. Things occur to you that wouldn’t have occurred to you before, even to a predatory malefactor overflowing with insatiable appetites. He’s shifted into new territory, like Anthony in that classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” who can make things and people disappear with his mind and holds a whole town in his juvenile thrall, sending anyone who hurts his feelings or make him feel bad to the cornfield.
This is, needless to say, not a good development. But it is still one that opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit. He’s increasingly reckless, acting like someone who is free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers. The reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular. There have been efforts to rebrand his approval numbers as “low but stable.” And that’s true to a degree. But they’re really low, at unprecedented levels of unpopularity for anyone at this point in their presidency with the exception of his own first term. As the country dips into ever deeper levels of corruption and impulse control despotism, the opposition has to mine it for everything it’s worth.