Since the White House Correspondence Association's Dinner attack, Donald Trump has gone full gonzo on his pet project, a ballroom.
In the United States of 2026, with a massive deficit, declining world status, a war its loosing, a culture that's moved beyond balls, only Trump and his acolytes, most of whom have never been in a ballroom, care about this project. Probably for that reason we're hearing all sort of excuses on why this is an absolute necessity. It's for the safety of the President and for a military command and control bunker.
Both of which are two really good reasons not to build it.
Underneath the ballroom would be a giant command and control structure. It would replace the secret but not so secret Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) dating back to World War II. The PEOC was itself an example of paranoia. It was probably much more useful during the Cold War than it was during World War Two.
It probably is obsolete. Times change.
All of which is a good reason not to build it.
The fact of the matter is that since the start of World War Two security and privilege has attached to the office of the President at an ever increasing rate. Special cars, special aircraft, a dedicated helicopter and a house with a bunker.
In recent years some paranoid Americans who like to imagine the world turning to shit, by which they mean the United States as the rest of the world doesn't count, have built their own bunkers. It's fun. It provides them with a false sense of security. But they can't launch wars.
The President can and he's launched two so far with a third nearly inevitable. Surrounded by security as he is, he probably feels perfectly safe, although the dinner attack would tend that isn't really true. Anyhow, people feeling perfectly safe do dumb and destructive things.
Trump himself is a perfect example of that. His income has made him feel perfectly safe from economic disaster and convinced himself that he's an intelligent man. And during his administration men who raped teenage girls have been safe, due to their association with him. The amount of financial oddities going on during Trump's administration has shown that lots of people associated with him feel pretty safe doing things they would not otherwise do.
And Trump has felt free to participate in a war that murdered the oppositions political leadership.
Nobody should feel that safe.
That is, I realize, as shocking thing to say, but a leader should, at least to some degree, share the fate and dangers of his people. Lots of Americans go about their daily activities knowing they could be killed at random and nobody is going to do anything about it. Servicemen in the Middle East no doubt knew right from the onset that they were not safe from Iranian attacks. Quite frankly, Americans here in the United States aren't free from Iranian attacks either, we've just been oddly lucky so far.
The President of the United States, whomever he is, ought to be in the same situation as the rest of us, no matter who he is. No one man is that valuable such that he should benefit from billions of dollars of effort to set him aside in safety from the people he serves.
And the same for the military. We have command and control facilities already. We have enough. If we don't, well, that would be odd and so be it.
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