The Trump House(™)

In a world where the sweeping scandals, rampant cruelty and corruption, economic arson, and international betrayals at Trump’s hands are eroding our institutions, I read today about the removal of an ancient magnolia tree from the White House grounds and found it unspeakably sad.

It is, to be sure, an old specimen, tired and battered by time and fate. The Jackson Magnolia (and its twin) were seedlings in 1828 when President Andrew Jackson brought them from his home in Tennessee and planted them in the loamy soil of the White House as a memorial to his late wife. For a man of Jackson’s bloody temperament, it was a surprisingly romantic and profound gesture.

Now, the Jackson Magnolia—a Witness Tree older than anyone alive today—is on the chopping block. Donald Trump claims the magnolia must go, that it’s too old and too dangerous to remain. Perhaps it is. He insists chainsawing down the ancient tree is part of “tremendous enhancements to the White House.”

Maybe it’s time; perhaps it has run its course. Still, some small edge of guilt must be gnawing at Trump, prompting him to spend so much “Executive Time” justifying the decision. His long bleat on Truth Social came, I think, because, despite his President-for-Life fantasies, Americans still see the White House as something on loan to those who earn the chance to reside there. They treasure continuity and tradition in this storied symbol.

When the Jackson Magnolia goes—even if the arborists say it must—we’ll lose a little something about the White House, as we are losing many things these days. Trump famously wants his own branding imposed on everything, even on historic and sacred spaces. Inside and out, the White House is getting “the Trump Treatment.”

Soon, he’ll lord over a new patio where he can DJ from his iPad—a cold, sprawling slab where the famous White House Rose Garden once bloomed in quiet dignity—surveying what he has wrought like any other gimcrack developer. Here is a man who can’t stand unadorned beauty, the peace of a garden, or the faint stir of history. He dragged his tasteless Mar-a-Lago aesthetic—already a betrayal of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s vision—into the White House.

He seems determined to strip away the gentle hush of the White House grounds, that subtle dignity that transcended political tides. Where a visitor might once savor the contrast between the peaceful gardens and the gravity of the work within, he insists on replicating the ugliness of his administration on the exterior as well. Trump seems to have fallen in love with the idea of recreating his vulgar Palm Beach retreat at the President’s House, blind to the irony that a place so titled might demand a certain humility or at least reverence for all the souls who have passed through before him. But that’s not how he sees it. He is like a rutting animal, wanting to impose, to mark, to conquer. He wants his changes to scar and stain, to leave traces of himself that are impossible to ignore.

Even the sanctity of the Oval Office isn’t safe. A room once boasting calm, refined lines—centuries of design nodding politely to the grace of democracy—now drips with gold leaf, courtesy of that crass Dollar Store Midas. Trump seems to have gathered the most rococo, gilded trappings, and slathered every surface with them. If it feels cluttered, overwrought, and vulgar, it reflects his taste.

“More gold leaf!” might as well be the main inspiration on his Tacky Dictator Pinterest board. If you thought Melania’s Forest of Despair Christmas décor was bad before, just wait until this season. (Not that Melania really lives in the White House; I’m reliably told she’s only slept there a handful of times since he was re-elected.)

Since John Adams first took up residence, every president has understood he was merely a temporary tenant, present only because the American people sent him to lead, not to reign. Their personal expressions of taste in the Oval and the Residence were restrained, respectful, careful. They treated the White House with the dignity it richly deserves.

Perhaps those stately trees would sigh and remind us: everything you do here leaves a mark, whether wise and subtle or crass and gaudy, whether you’re a good man in a bad time or a bad man in a good one. Sadly, we now have a bad man in a bad time, determined to make the country over in his own image.

This is the tragedy: a man so obsessed with monumentality that he cannot see the small, sacred significance of what he’s destroying. It’s not just about the rose garden or the ancient trees or even those walls now gasping under faux gold. It’s about the silent erosion of memory, tradition, and the intangible resonance of a building that, in spirit, belongs to everyone who’s ever called this nation home.

I lived in Washington for a long time. In college, I was just two blocks away from the White House, and in those freer days, I liked to walk its perimeter at sunset. There was a hush that settled at twilight, even as lights still glowed in the West Wing and in the windows of that magnificent Old Executive Office Building. It was a small urban forest, a garden tended with love and care and respect. All those trees, their roots entwined with the stories of those who nurtured them.

These are the things Trump and his equally vulgar bride seem determined to erase. No one should be shocked if he someday mounts a neon TRUMP sign over the portico. Perhaps he’ll rebrand it as “The Trump House(™). In a world where a madman in the Oval Office seems determined to burn our system of government to the ground, it may seem trivial to mourn dignified architectural details, old trees, tangled rose bushes, and the soft traditions that make the White House what it is.

Yet it stings to see the White House decorated like Saddam Hussein’s palace, the Rose Garden turned into a stage for shallow revelry. It hurts because it is a wound—one more cut into an institution meant to outlast each occupant.

It’s a tragedy of arrogance, to be sure, but maybe more than that, it’s a tragedy of forgetfulness. The White House and its grounds have sheltered our better angels; they’ve also endured our lesser devils.

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We know he is a man who cannot abide anything that does not dazzle him back, that does not flatter his desires and ego. For Trump, the White House will never be gaudy enough, sexy enough, flashy enough. She’s an older girl, marked by the lines of her beautiful past, wise now, quiet, reflective. For Trump and men like him, that means it’s time to trade her in for a trophy, to send her to Dr. Mar-a-Lago for the Treatment.

While so much else burns around us, while so many Americans suffer under an administration bereft of hope and leadership, I know this may border on the trivial. But history demands certain things of us as Americans: service, courage, honor, and memory.

I fear that in his frenzy of self-glorification, Trump will erase the long, soft hum of history. He will mark and scar it all in his image, leaving his vulgar courtiers to lounge in what used to be the Rose Garden, adoring a shambling old degenerate blasting “YMCA” over the 18 acres—a man undeserving of the White House, whether as president or resident.