Donald Trump is building a ballroom at the White House.
A big one, naturally. Donald Trump has never met a square foot he thought was doing enough.
The country has an immigration fight, a debt problem, a housing problem, wars overseas, and enough political division to keep cable television in business until the Second Coming.
The president looked over this situation and apparently concluded that what America really needed was someplace larger to dance.
Not just a ballroom, either. A Trump ballroom.
There will be marble. There will be gold. There will undoubtedly be chandeliers large enough to affect the tides.
Trump says it will be beautiful.
Trump says nearly everything he builds is beautiful, usually several times, which is helpful because otherwise some of us might not know.
The fellow has always had an unusual relationship with taste. If you gave him the Sistine Chapel, he’d probably ask whether Michelangelo could work his initials into the ceiling.
Then we learned there is serious construction underneath the ballroom too.
A bunker.
Now that is almost unfair to a political columnist. God occasionally writes the first draft himself.
The president is building a palace upstairs and a hiding place downstairs.
There are scholars who can spend 400 pages explaining authoritarian psychology. Trump has saved them the trouble and poured it in concrete.
Someone inevitably pointed out that Hitler also had a grand ceremonial hall with a bunker beneath it.
This does not mean Donald Trump is Hitler.
It does mean that if you are already being accused of admiring dictators, you might want to avoid accidentally recreating their floor plans.
Just as a matter of public relations.
Trump probably did not study the architecture of the Third Reich. I would be mildly surprised to learn he had studied the architecture of the first two.
What matters is the instinct.
Big room. Big columns. Big entrance. Big name.
Everything must tell you that the man in the middle is important.
Trump has spent most of his life putting his name on buildings so people would know who owned them. Becoming president presented him with an unusual difficulty.
The White House already had a name.
So now it gets a ballroom.
Presidents used to worry about what history would say about them.
Trump appears more interested in what the maître d’ will say when 600 people arrive for dinner.
And somewhere beneath all those chandeliers will be the bunker.
As if history had decided the joke was still too subtle, Trump even has Natalie Harp.
She is the aide known for following him around with a portable printer, supplying him with stories to read, particularly the sort that tell him he’s right, he’s winning, and everybody loves him.
Hitler didn’t have a human printer.
He had something better.
He had a bunker full of people who had learned that the safest news to give the boss was the news the boss wanted to hear.
So there we have it.
The ballroom upstairs.
The bunker downstairs.
And somebody nearby to tell him the crowds are still cheering.
Why step on a punch line history has been kind enough to write for you?
