Governance takes a back seat as Trump continues on his monumental march of folly

“Ooh, painting the roses red
And many a tear we shed
Because we know
They’ll cease to grow
In fact, they'll soon be dead
And yet we go ahead
Painting the roses red…

And... The Queen, she likes ’em red
If she saw white instead,
She’d raise a fuss
And each of us
Would quickly lose his head…” — Excerpt from the Alice in Wonderland Disney animated feature.

You can watch the Red Queen painting the roses red here and her arrival here. If these animated antics don’t remind readers of the real shenanigans in Washington, probably nothing will.

Even as you read this, construction is under way of a giant outdoor arena (including a huge superstructure for sound, lighting and special effects equipment) for UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) cage fights that are to take place on the South Lawn of the White House on the US holiday on 14 June — Flag Day. It is no coincidence this is also Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — and that the cage fighting is billed as a teaser for the 250th anniversary of US independence. I am not making this up.

At this UFC spectacle, there will be temporary seating for thousands of VIP guests and members of the military on the White House lawn to witness this madness (and the lawn will be in desperate need of resodding after this mayhem), and many thousands more are expected to watch on Jumbotron television screens in the public park south of the White House.

We kid you not. Somebody has been watching the film Gladiator far too many times for their health.

Beyond the sheer crassness of it, I am having trouble figuring out what cage fighting has to do with the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, let alone who is ultimately going to pay for this.

But remember, the owner of the UFC competition franchise is Trump buddy Dana White, so, given past practice, we can guess a good chunk of the actual cost of this will ultimately fall upon taxpayers — once all the grifting is over.

To say the truth about this madness is to acknowledge this is just one more demonstration that the Trump presidency is all about “me, Me, ME!” and garish showmanship — and much less about carrying out government business in a rational way.

The erection of a cage fighting arena is of a piece with tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a ginormous ballroom (on top of a secure emergency facility for the president and senior aides) — a ballroom that will fatally end the symmetry of the architectural lines of the most famous residence in the US, turning it into a Washington annex for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago clubhouse. And it is not as if there are no other federally owned venues in the immediate vicinity of the White House.

But the incumbent president has no sense of propriety, history or good taste. There are threats to spraypaint the grey facade of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (the Victorian wedding cake of a building just to the west of the White House) in Grecian White.

Then there has been the renaming of the US Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, appending the name “Trump” to both, and then suddenly deciding to shutter the Kennedy Center for a two-year revamp. (This followed the collapse in the number of performing groups coming to the centre, once it received its new name.) Somebody is being petty and spiteful.

And let’s not forget those over-the-top, faux-gold decorations in the Oval Office of the White House, the changing of the colour of the Reflecting Pool (making it non-reflective) located between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monuments, and the planned destruction of two of DC’s publicly owned, municipal golf courses in favour of a sculpture garden of Donald Trump’s personal heroes.

Topping it all off, there is now a plan afoot for a massive Arc de Trump on the traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery — thereby destroying the visual link between those two secular but sacred spaces. Preliminary structural work for the arch is on the go, despite a growing public uproar.

None of these monumental changes has been approved by Congress, nor have funds been appropriated by Congress, nor have the changes gained approvals from the appropriate advisory committees and boards, save for when Trump fired the previous members of some of those bodies and appointed lackeys to rubber-stamp his desires.

Well, maybe we should be grateful he has not yet decided to act like the Roman emperor Caligula, who had threatened to make his favourite horse a senator when the senate opposed him. (Of course, Trump famously hates pets, so at least we won’t have that to endure.)

Painting roses

Meanwhile, the White House continues to spew out a farrago of stories about private donors (read companies eager to gain the favour of the president) footing the bills for all this, followed by him asking — or demanding — that Congress appropriate funds for these exercises of this Trumpian edifice complex. Does all this ring a bell about Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen and painting roses to cover up their original colour?

In response to all this, a whole roster of civic groups, statutory bodies and concerned individuals acting in concert have filed suits in various courts in attempts to stop these efforts before they remake the face of Washington in accordance with Trump’s desires.

I hear you demur that Baron Haussmann rebuilt the public face of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. But he knew what he was doing, and his design was clearly for the better, as legions of tourists and Paris residents agree. By contrast, the Trumpian impulse is changing Washington to reflect his personal desires and a constant need to impress or intimidate. There are now those massive scowling banners of his physiognomy, hanging from buildings like the Department of Justice headquarters, reminding people who’s the boss.

In the midst of all this destruction and construction, we should not ignore the new, gold-painted Don Colossus statue in Florida, adjacent to the Trump Doral golf course. It really is as ugly as sin, looking like the kind of statue one would find in Pyongyang, North Korea, of Kim Il-Sung or of Lenin and Stalin in every city of the pre-de-Stalinised Soviet Union. But without doubt, King Ozymandias — “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” — would have been green with envy over all this self-glorification before time destroyed his statue (check out the text of Shelley’s famous poem here).

Still, despite all this ugliness, it is just possible we might be able to swallow really hard and accept this obscene self-glorification — even the bizarre post-midnight social media rants and the bizarre imagery of him as a healing Jesus Christ figure — if he would just spend time focusing coherently on the work of governance rather than binge-watching Fox News.

Instead, in the tortuously complicated Iran conflict, the Trump administration is gyrating wildly to avoid ending up with a settlement far more problematic than the 2015 multination accord negotiated by the Obama administration with Iran — but abrogated in the first Trump administration.

Cavalier attitude

Despite major hits to its economy, the casualties, and the damage to military and civilian infrastructure, Iran’s new leaders (after the previous ones were killed) have essentially held the US (and Israel) to a draw using geopolitical realities — choking off global shipping’s use of the Strait of Hormuz. This has hit the world’s dependence on oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf. And not surprisingly, the price of petroleum has skyrocketed — with knock-on effects on a multitude of other products and services. There seems to be a cavalier attitude by the Trump administration that they wanted Iran to fold to US demands, and so the Iranians would obligingly do so.

Concurrently, demonstrating an unstable approach to the country’s other international policies, the Trump administration continues to unhinge the US’s relationships with its traditional allies in Europe and Asia and generate other ructions in the international economic system, as well as that embarrassing forelock-tugging to both Russia and China’s leaders.

Such behaviour has provoked concern in Taipei, Tokyo, and other East Asian capitals. Then, too, there is his behaviour towards Kyiv — even as Ukraine continues to struggle against a Russian invasion, a conflict, the importance of which the Trump administration barely acknowledges.

Meanwhile, this same administration continues giving the impression of an imminent push against the regime in Cuba. Perhaps it was beguiled by its success in capturing the now-former Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro.

On the domestic side, the Trump administration has eschewed governance in favour of carrying out revenge against every Republican office-holder, former official (or other critics) who had ever dissented from supporting the Trump administration. (And, apparently, even anyone who ever won a civil judgment against him, as with E Jean Carroll.)

His vengeful efforts have led to the defeat of veteran Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn by Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton — the latter a man sufficiently morally challenged that even Democrats are cheering this primary election result. They argue that Paxton’s candidacy may make it easier for the Democratic candidate, Texas state legislator James Talarico, to win in November — and that could help Democrats reclaim the Senate.

Meanwhile, the Trump lock on the electorate’s sentiments continues to slide as polling shows substantial dissatisfaction with the administration’s economic policies — including the potent question of price inflation — and in particular the cost of petrol as an outcome of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This economic unease is paired with a similar dissatisfaction towards Trump’s Iran conflict policies. The midterm election gets closer day by day, so cue that ominous drumbeat.

Put everything together — the president’s erratic personal behaviour and his bizarre efforts to rebuild Washington, DC’s built environment and national monuments in his own style and in his honour, plus a lack of serious attention to national policy — and the president is on the way to becoming regarded as the worst president of modern times.

In all this, we have yet to factor in the moral crisis embedded in the president’s cashing in through governmental financial decision-making and the country’s international relationships. Collectively, all of these issues will become intense preoccupations of a Democratic Congress, should that come to be, making the final two years of the Trump era extremely painful for him and his sycophants as investigations, hearings, summonses, testimony and lawsuits pile up and up. DM