The White House Ballroom - Donald Trump, Bourgeois, Lowbrow, One Of Us, Get Over It

The first wrecking ball through the walls of the East Wing of the White House sent tremors through Washington's progressive cabals.  If Trump's assault on the institutions of government, his gestapo rounding up of asylum-seeking immigrants, his rolling back of the most significant social reforms in decades, the reconfiguring of both the racial and gender landscape, and the resetting of the environmental clock wasn't horrible enough, the man takes it on himself to destroy the very hearth and home of the American republic, the White House.  

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body. 

There were many reasons for Trump's decision to remake the East Wing into a grandiose ballroom.  First and foremost was adding insult to injury.  The ballroom, so outrageously tacky and out of place in the old, historical, revered building, would be one mighty fuck you to the presumptuous, elitist, insular cadres of progressive Washington.  

Yes, it would be decorated with appointments from Walmart and Target, yes it would have the faux grandeur, the preposterous imitative look of the grand ballroom of Versailles re-imaged by Hollywood, yes it would be bourgeois, lowbrow to its very posts, lintels, and sconces. 

 

Second was of course a show of executive power in the most visible, palpable, and irrevocable way possible.  It was one thing to mandate ICE and federal troops to clean up Washington, Portland, and Baltimore, another thing altogether to show his feckless, humiliated political enemies that he could actually take jackhammers to the White House and remake it in his image. 

Now, some of the old men in the Senate remember Camelot, the halcyon days of high culture and taste during the brief Kennedy administration - days of Robert Frost, Pablo Casals, and the elegant old New England furniture of Chippendale and Townsend.  It was all Eastern Establishment taste and preference, and expression of American aristocracy, rival to none.

Americans looked beyond the fact that Jack Kennedy was the son of a lace-curtain Irishman, bootlegger, Nazi sympathizing Ambassador to the Court of St. James, dishonorably removed, and using all his buggering influence to get his son into the White House.  They saw him and Jackie as American royalty, and even if they could never aspire to such heights of sophistication it was good that their President expressed the best and the brightest of the land. 

That brief tenure of good taste was an anomaly, a hiatus in low culture. The real America, a bar-fighting, brutish, mall-walking, trailer trash, big box store shopping, off the rack Chinese dresses and two pants suits buying America, was back. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, one of us. 

He was the first president to understand and embody our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment rectitude. Issues have never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward was visceral and absolute.  There was no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus was the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Most are sons and daughters of Italians, Irish, Jews, African slaves, and border-bound Salvadorans.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

We are not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. We are decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our cars We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, teachers, mechanics, and rent collectors.

Progressives hate Trump's America for all its lowbrow instincts. They hate every sequin, every strand of tinsel, every waft of cheap perfume, every high-bosomed line dancer, ever bit of glitter.  They do not hate Trump because of his alleged and presumed crimes and misdemeanors, but because of who he is.  

He has had all they ever wanted - wealth, women, yachts, and la dolce vita.  They, squirreled away in their carrels, on marches, in conferences, and in confessionals, have had none of it and can only dream of such abandon.  A life of good causes is dire, gloomy, and dark. 

Trump is an American president whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of America who want what they can't have - a bourgeois, cotton candy St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls. 

How to deal with such a betrayal?  No more Camelot, Kennebunkport, or Hyde Park; no more Renaissance Weekends, summers on the Vineyard or even vacations in Maui; but a full-blown, tinsel-bedecked, Rockettes, over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza.  Impossible to have envisaged by the coastal elites, a true American has acceded to the White House.

Get over it, man up, face facts - the era of presumptuousness, pomposity, and faux reformist sanctimony is over.  The American progressive Left is a dour, dumpy, humorless lot.  No joy, no exuberance, no delight - just morose, morbid predictions, scurrying criticism, and abominable hatred.  

Which is why progressives hate Donald Trump so much.  He has swept aside the doom and gloom of Washington, the fearmongering, manipulative insidiousness of the Left.  He has opened the windows, raised the flag, sung the National Anthem, and welcomed legions of baton-twirling majorettes, oompah marching bands, and the great American lowbrow culture in all its exuberance. 

The ballroom is symbol of this deliberate insouciance, an in-your-face statement that the real America, the people's America is back and back with a vengeance.  Love it or leave it, we are here to stay.