My New York Times Comment to Ross Douthat.
As I'm on the road in Austin this week, I missed a lot of news, but reading this opinion piece blew my top. My response to Ross Douthat’s article is on the NYT website, but it's also here. Apologies if there are formatting errors, as I wrote this on my phone early this morning in haste.
Douthat’s essay is a master class in genteel capitulation — the kind of argument that dresses up moral cowardice in architectural theory. His whole premise depends on pretending Trump’s act of destruction is a conversation about aesthetics rather than about authoritarian impulse. That’s like reviewing the “craftsmanship” of the sledgehammer that tore through a national monument.
He calls the demolition “good to build,” as if the country were just a neglected homeowner finally putting in that long-overdue rec room. It’s astonishing: a sitting president razes a piece of living history to build a donor ballroom, and Douthat’s takeaway is that progressives don’t appreciate bold construction timelines. He romanticizes Trump’s “bull-in-a-china-shop approach,” ignoring that the bull is demolishing the china to sell the shards at auction. Even his comparison to Obama’s library reeks of false equivalence — a private foundation project versus a public desecration performed by the head of state, paid for with state power.
The whole thing reads like an apologia for surrender — the intellectual class rationalizing the strongman because he happens to like columns. Douthat mistakes motion for vision, marble for meaning, and expediency for courage. The real scandal isn’t that the East Wing came down fast; it’s that anyone with a platform could look at the ruins and call it “appropriate, pleasing, fine.”