President Donald Trump is racing to build his big dumb bribe ballroom before the Supreme Court cuts him off—not that it’s at all a sure thing that they will tell him to stop. But he’s not taking any chances.
So he’s got a team building this monstrosity 20 hours per day, seven days per week in order to beat the clock and, regrettably, you can see this thing is taking shape.
Why? Because he wants to be able to tell the high court’s justices, whenever they do take up the case, that it’s too far along to be stopped now.
It cannot be stressed enough that while multiple courts have told him to stop building, they’ve also told him the solution if he wants to keep building: Go. To. Congress. But the administration simply won’t, because Trump doesn’t want any input or oversight or restrictions.
According to Joshua Fisher, who is the Trump toady overseeing this shady project, it’s now 65% complete, and is already five stories dug into the ground and 70 feet high, and 80% of all the rebar is completed. And it can’t be stopped. And Fisher isn’t being subtle about it.
“Given the current progress, the superstructure is beyond the point of return,” he said.
And if the Supreme Court tells them to take it down, or even just requires alterations to the plan? “There would be no way to do so,” Fisher insists.
Yeah, this makes it sound like Trump wasn’t aware all along that this was a possibility. When U.S. District Judge Richard Leon first enjoined above-ground construction last December but allowed below-ground security-related stuff to continue, he told them they were on “fair notice” that if they did anything that prevented the court from later ordering a change, “the government should be prepared to take it down.” Yet just one month later, the administration was back in court teeing up the argument that the courts can’t stop the construction now that it had started, with Department of Justice denizen Yaakov Roth whining, “Are we going to suspend construction in the middle?”
Huh. I was hitherto unaware of the “can’t make us stop now that we started, nyah nyah” law.
If Joshua Fisher’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the anonymous quote in the Trump-penned brief to the Supreme Court: “This building is already being adjudged to be one of the most beautiful of its kind, anywhere in the country.”
How does that work, exactly, given the thing is still mostly a hole in the ground?
Fisher’s timeline for this is nonsense, no matter how you look at it. Just three months ago, it wasn’t going to be finished until September 2028, but now that Trump faces the possibility that the Supreme Court may tell him no, it’s right around the corner.
It was always a blinding mistake for courts to stay their orders so Trump could keep building while litigation continued, because he was always going to do exactly what he did here.
It feels so dumb to keep saying this. It has shades of “but a dog can’t play basketball,” a pathetic demand that we return to norms, but This. Is. Not. Normal.
It’s not just the whole “diverted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars” part, though that’s a biggie. But even the notion that this thing’s timeline is “whatever Donald Trump says it is, surprise!” Is also exceedingly not normal.
This would be true even in the private sector, even for developers rather than presidents. There’s nowhere that a developer can throw up a $900 million building that is 90,000 square feet with nary a permit, nary a timeline, demanding round-the-clock building even while plans for the thing continue to change.
Which is why Trump loves this all so much. He sees it as a chance to build what he wanted, as he always wanted: oversized gilded crap, where everything will either look like Mar-a-Lago or his gross gold-plated house.
But now that he’s in the White House and spineless GOP Congress members refuse to keep him in check, he doesn’t have to follow any rules. He doesn’t have to spend any of his own money. It’s a dream come true for the world’s greediest, tackiest man.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
