Image Is Everything - Why The Left Is So Apoplectic About Trump's Ballroom And Triumphal Arch

'What a boor', said Vicki Parsons about Donald Trump. 'A bourgeois clown, a lowbrow dolt'.  The President's new White House ballroom, was in her opinion a showy, tasteless, pseudo-Baroque monstrosity, a garish, overdone monstrosity - just like the man himself. 

And that was just for openers.  His 250' tall triumphal arch, a monument to himself in all his regal glory would dominate the landscape, obscure the view of Lee mansion and Arlington Cemetery, dwarf everything in its shadow, an unnecessary monument to arrogance, self-importance, and cultural obtuseness. 

The 'renovation' of the Kennedy Center, now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center would be in the same vein - a rococo monstrosity with Italian sconces and chandeliers, Roman statues, reflecting pools, arbors, and canopies. 

The Field of Heroes, Trump's plan to destroy a park overlooking the Potomac and replace it with an array of statues of 'remarkable' Americans was unconscionable, a travesty, a violation of Capital sanctity, a destruction of heritage, and an absolutely lowbrow testament to his own lack of cultural significance. 

Closing the southern border, destroying Iran's nuclear capability and its machinery of terrorism, its removal of a brutal socialist dictator in Venezuela, the restoration of American energy independence, the removal of punitive restrictions and taxes on private enterprise, and his dismissal of insidious, baseless claims of gender neutrality and his outing of the biggest scam of all, climate change all go without notice in the face of the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center, and the Field of Heroes. 

The American Left has never been able to get over Donald Trump, to treat him as a political adversary and enjoin him in debate about the economic, financial, social, and geopolitical future of the United States.  The hated what he represented from the moment he arrived on the scene.  He was nothing but a carny barker, a tout, a cheap vaudevillian, and a bourgeois cultural caricature.  

He was outrageously outspoken instead of following Washington protocol.  He was calling their media shills 'stupid fools', denigrating the press as fake and unnecessary, bellowing faux patriotism and faith when he was actually a money-hungry, graspy, Wall Street robber baron out to feather his own nest and that of his cronies.  He was a Borscht Belt comedian, as politically incorrect as Jackie Mason or Rodney Dangerfield.  He was gross, insulting, and mean. 

Vicki remembered the Kennedy Camelot days - an inauguration poem by Robert Frost, Pablo Casals and the best of America's high culture, the redecorating of the White House with respect to American history and tradition - Chippendale and Townsend furniture, Revere silver, Copley and Remington.  State dinners were elegant, proper affairs with waltzes, orchestral variations, and a sophisticated list of invitees. 

Now, that was America, she said; and he was a true American president.  America loved him for Camelot, a never-never land of make-believe.  Kennedy himself was the son of a mick barroom brawler, a valueless exploitative capitalist, and a Nazi sympathizer.  There was nothing Old England about Kennedy, but he made a good show of it. Americans loved the British Edwardian television series, Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey even though as a nation of Walmart greeters they had no more idea of aristocracy was let alone the high-toned English variety than the Elysian Fields. 

It didn't matter.  No one looked beyond Jackie Kennedy's sophistication and husband Jack's show of cultural wit.  No one cared how he got the presidency, how he bungled the Bay of Pigs, how he got the US entangled in the unwinnable war in Vietnam, and how he turned the Oval Office into a brothel, so indiscreet was he that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got the goods on him and delayed any passage of a Civil Rights bill in return for his silence. 

All this at least partially explains why the American Left cannot look beyond the ballroom, Trump's lowbrow culture, his gross and unpresidential demeanor, and his withering ad hominem attacks.  Image is everything, cultural image above all,  For all Joe Biden's vacancy, the Left says, for all his stumbling errancy, and inability to put two thoughts together, he was a good man, a considerate man, a presidential man. 

There have been all kinds of presidents in the White House from cattle-rustling LBJ to Tricky Dick, and Trailer Trash Bill; but all of them hewed to propriety, acting presidential.  Donald Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about propriety and received wisdom.  He is the young Eddie Murphy in his anything goes excoriating humor; or D.L. Hughley or Dave Chappelle.  He says anything, anytime wherever. 

He is a breath of fresh air after the four penitential, sanctimonious, and censorious Biden years.  'These are my pronouns' expressed the arrogant emptiness of that time, and Trump and America were having no more of it. 

It didn't help that Trump was doing exactly as he promised.  Sending phalanxes of bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razing the bloated, inefficient, self-serving bureaucracies that for too long had sucked taxpayer money and done nothing with it, drove progressives crazy.  His deployment of ICE (Immigration Police) to round up and deport illegal aliens was the last straw.  This tyrant was forcibly removing sincere, needy, refugees from poverty and oppression. 

Of course the Left turned a blind eye to immigrant Somali fraud, graft, and scams in Minnesota, Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gangbangers, and hordes of criminals escaping justice in their own countries for a more congenial home in the United States.  The open southern border's influx was Castro's Mariel Boat Lift writ large.  The Cuban dictator opened the doors to his prisons and sent criminal outlaws, murderers and dissidents alike to our shores. 

In other words Trump was the worst possible president to sit in the Oval Office - a lowlife bourgeois interloper, a bully, a racist pig.  His image of demonic excess grew every day; but the sly old fox knows exactly what he was doing - he loved to outrage the Left, to give them shibboleths of low culture, fodder for their assumptions about kingship and autocracy, to enrage them with ballrooms and arches while he went about the serious business of restoring America to a position of world authority.

So the ballroom and the Arch will be built, bourgeois is back, and the unpresidential president will continue to go about his geopolitical mastery.  

Will he survive the coming elections? Or will millions of Americans have so bought into the Left's fantastical creation of the President that they pull the wrong lever on election day? What seems clear to many political observers and certainly to the vast number of Trump supporters, he deserves his day, a trouble-free completion of his term, and a congenial and supportive Congress. 

'Now, that's a stupid question', Trump retorted to the CNN White House correspondent asking about the coming midterm elections.  Of course there would be universal Republican victory!  Whether the American people have finally seen through the lawfare, the decade of slanderous, absurd allegations, the drumbeat of Trump hatred is unsure.  It seems as though the conservative juggernaut has finally gained momentum, but the American voter is a credulous, fickle one.