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A self-declared “secretary of war” keeps committing war crimes; people are dying in Africa because of Musk’s cuts to USAid; farm bankruptcies in the US are surging; ICE keeps acting with impunity; measles is spreading … and we are worried about a ballroom? The ballroom is not just the president’s peculiar obsession, but a symbol for many of the character of Trump 2.0: the unprecedented corruption; the destruction of checks and balances (as Congress, with its power of the purse, keeps being ignored); the sheer desire for vandalism. The swift pivot of Trump and his acolytes from the assassination attempt to pro-ballroom propaganda in the name of security adds two new, disturbing elements: the ballroom-as-bunker is appropriate for a leader afraid of his own people; less obviously, it also aligns Trump with the Silicon Valley figures who are anticipating an apocalypse (which their own conduct is hastening) – and who seek refuge on private islands, in newly founded cities, and indeed in what has become known as “apocalypse bunkers”.
“It cannot be built fast enough,” Trump announced after the incident on Saturday night; but reasons for his ballroom obsession predate the White House correspondents’ dinner: his biographers have pointed out that catering and ballrooms have been one of his few successful business ventures; a ballroom, just as with the space at Mar-a-Lago, provides a stage for grand entrances and adulation by crowds whose composition can be perfectly controlled; and, not least, as other aspiring autocrats have shown, a huge edifice is a statement about power: it sends a signal to critics that the leader has triumphed over them, and that his legacy – at least what he has done to the built environment – cannot be undone.
The focus on security also predates the assassination attempt: after a George W Bush-appointed judge barred the construction of the ballroom in the absence of authorization by Congress, Trumpists claimed that completion of the edifice was an urgent matter of national security. The legal opinion sardonically remarked that the large hole next to the White House – declared a special risk – was of the president’s own making. To be sure, Republicans trying to curry favor with the president are now rushing to introduce legislation; this week, a lawsuit was filed against the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with language that desperately tries to imitate Trump’s argot (“They are very bad for our Country;” they suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, etc – things no self-respecting lawyer would have written in a previous era).
It is a stretch to suggest that a president can only be secure inside what Trump has touted as a “Militarily Secure Top Secret Ballroom”, with bulletproof glass and a roof safe from drones. After all, Trump attends UFC events and spends inordinate amounts of time at a Florida club which is far from secure (as an armed intruder in February yet again demonstrated). In any case, the White House Correspondents Association, if it has any self-respect left in the face of a chief executive who has launched unprecedented attacks on the US press, would refuse to hold an event inside a White House from which it is supposed to keep a critical distance. Trump, with the unfailing ability to spot opportunities for favoritism and corruption, has hinted that he might allow certain private associations inside his ballroom.
Of course, security around political buildings has become ever tighter over the past decades, and especially since September 11; long gone are the days when people could just walk up to the White House. But Trump’s emphasis on combining the ballroom with a bunker is still peculiar. The great Renaissance architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti famously pointed out that only a tyrant needs a fortress, ideally removed from a republic’s city center; a popular ruler could afford to have a rather open edifice in spaces associated with the normal hustle-and-bustle of citizens. Many members of the Trump administration live on military bases; the claim that they are so much more at risk than politicians in the past remains unverified, though of course it fits a model of propaganda where a sense of imminent threat (and fever fantasies about an all-powerful “antifa organization”) have to kept up.
Trump, ever the real-estate promoter of special amenities, has been touting a bunker with a “State of the Art Hospital”. As Garrett Graff has pointed out, the original White House bunker was constructed for a scenario in which Germany attacked during the second world war, and, subsequently, for nuclear war; it was memorably used during September 11. But it was never meant to be a well-equipped place for longer stays, since the whole US strategy of “continuity” for the executive, as Graff has also reminded us, is centered on getting the president to a place where he cannot be located easily. One could imagine a situation where Trump, who evidently was not exactly comfortable leaving the White House in 2021, would try to hole up and refuse to cede power. This is not a prediction; but given how often the seemingly unimaginable has happened in the past 10 years, it is also not a sign of political paranoia.
Even more disturbing is the thought that Trump’s bunker mentality now matches that of his Silicon Valley oligarchs. As Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein have argued, on one level, they do know how much the climate is being damaged and how much their own policies might hasten the arrival of political cataclysms. Trump 2.0 has engaged in a form of reckless self-destruction the consequences of which may well necessitate self-isolation: no limits on pollution; uncontrolled spreading of preventable diseases; ever-lessening concern with security around food and airplane flights. If there is any awareness at all of what this ultimately nihilistic drive will eventually produce, attempts to make what Trump calls “one of the safest pieces of land in the world” even safer for himself in the face of self-inflicted disasters begin to make a perverse sense.
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