The president has never understood that the White House (and government) aren’t his

Even if only intuitively, Donald Trump knows that the White House is a storehouse of power. He understands that, like the government itself, it is an institution that our impartial democratic system has spent two centuries nurturing and investing in. And this is why he wants it to be his, as surely as he wants the government to be his and as surely as he wants the government’s money to be his.

There was a moment at which he tipped his hand on this, when he made explicit what had already become obvious. It came during his 2020 acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination — a speech that, like his Jan. 6 speech five months later, was delivered from the White House complex itself. It was a blatant violation of the longstanding expectation that the White House wouldn’t be used for political purposes, an expectation that had created far bigger headaches for other politicians who engaged in far smaller violations.

During the 2020 speech, he was reading the standard self-celebratory litany from the teleprompter when he went off script for a moment.

“The fact is, I’m here—” he said, pausing as applause from the prior line interrupted him. But then he seemed to find import in that truncated line itself. He turned to the White House behind him, gesturing at it. “What’s the name of that building?”

The crowd applauded and cheered.

“The fact is, we are here and they’re not,” he said, now speaking off the cuff. Extended applause and cheers. “To me, one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world — and it’s not a building, it’s a home as far as I’m concerned. It’s not even a house, it’s a home,” Trump continued. “It’s a wonderful place with an incredible history, but it’s all because of you.”

As I was watching him say that in real-time, it struck me as important. It’s probably because, the night before, I’d written about the incredibly cynical incorporation of an immigrant naturalization ceremony — also taped at the White House — into the Republican convention programming time. It was obviously a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials (excluding the president) from using federally funded resources for campaigning. But Trump and his team did it anyway, just as they’d repeatedly violated the Act’s prohibitions over the preceding three years.

He and they were treating the White House and the presidency as though it was theirs — and here was Trump saying that he was there, not them, in this building that he called a home. He adopted the habit of giving esteemed visitors a ceremonial “key to the White House,” as though this was something that was his to bestow — a practice he continued even after he left office.

But as egregious and unusual as those manifestations of Trump’s sense that the White House was his to do with as he pleased, it was child’s play, a microcosm of the way in which Trump has behaved since January.

First, there was the gilding, the slow and gaudy accretion of gold-tinged objects and appliqués around the Oval Office. Then there was the Rose Garden, paved over to make a patio that felt more like the places where he and his customers would congregate at Mar-a-Lago. There was the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” images representing past presidents that were added along the west colonnade seemingly meant primarily to troll Joe Biden.

Now, as you know, he has authorized the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the visual counterweight to the West Wing.

The West Wing is home to the Oval Office and the president’s staff; the East Wing was where the First Lady has traditionally had her offices and where visitors would begin their tours. But in July, the page with information about visiting the White House was updated to inform Americans that an “upcoming expansion,” the addition of a “White House State Ballroom,” would go “where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits.” In recent days, construction crews have begun ripping the East Wing apart, bypassing input from historians or other branches of government.

Because Trump views the White House as his. For decades, Americans embraced the idea that electing non-politicians to office would improve governance, operating under the assumption that bringing an outsider’s view to calcified systems might spur fixes. This isn’t really how it worked out. We got a president who has no appreciation for the balance of federal power and no concept of the presidency as an entity that sits above the person who holds the title. We got someone with decades of experience in putting his name on things and vacuuming up money from all available sources and he’s putting that experience to work.

The metaphor of Trump crushing a portion of the White House as he aims bulldozers at democracy itself is almost too obvious to note. But it’s not just a symbolic parallel: both are rooted in the same indifference to what these American institutions mean to Americans and to America. Both are rooted in Trump wanting to treat those things as his own and now feeling empowered to do precisely that.

As of writing, by the way, the visitors page at the White House website still encourages people to reserve tours through the offices of their members of Congress. Those tours, the site advertises, will “include the public rooms in the East Wing”; whether hard hats will be provided is not indicated.

And at the top of the page is a ticker noting that the government is shut down — an act, it says, that is the fault of Democrats. That, too, is an inappropriate-if-not-illegal use of federal resources for partisan politics. Set beside the leveling a portion of what we once naively called “the people’s house,” though, that little piece of commentary is positively quaint.

Photo: Edited 1952 photo of the East Wing. (National Archives)