When Donald Trump decided to pursue a giant White House ballroom, the president handpicked architect James McCrery, who runs a small firm known for its work designing Catholic cathedrals. It wasn’t long, however, before trouble emerged.
The more the Republican president started micromanaging the endeavor and expanding the scope of the vanity project, the more the shambolic process reportedly did not sit well with McCrery.
And so, late last year, Trump hired a new architect to oversee the initiative — one who presumably would be comfortable with the president’s appetite for the ever-expanding, wildly popular project.
We’re just now, however, getting a better sense of what transpired behind the scenes. The Washington Post reported:
In the weeks leading up to his resignation last year, the first architect on the White House ballroom clashed with President Donald Trump over design features that the architect believed violated building safety codes, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
James McCrery II withdrew from the project last October after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on a preliminary design that did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.
According to the Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, the president heard the architect’s concerns but discounted them — not because he thought McCrery was wrong, but because he said building codes were irrelevant.
“I am the code,” Trump told him.
If accurate, the exchange was emblematic of a larger pattern in which the president has repeatedly made clear that he believes rules and limits apply to everyone except him.
“L’État, c’est moi” is a phrase attributed to France’s King Louis XIV, and 370 years later, the gap between “I am the state” and “I am the code” is narrow.
(The former architect did not comment on the substance of the underlying claims, nor did his successor. A White House statement, meanwhile, said, “Life safety issues have been addressed and resolved continuously as the design has evolved.”)
But this isn’t the only notable takeaway from the latest reporting. The Post’s article also included a series of striking ballroom designs and images that “Trump appeared to have marked up with his trademark black-ink Sharpie,” which show “how deeply involved the president has been in the details of the project.”
That’s not surprising, though it was a timely reminder about the president’s priorities: More than a decade into his career in Republican politics, Trump has never demonstrated even the slightest interest in the substance of governing or policymaking, but hand him a blueprint for a vanity project, and the guy suddenly engages in granular details.
To be sure, that engagement isn’t constructive — Trump apparently cares about his aesthetic preferences and self-glorification, not safety standards — but it’s hard not to wonder what national conditions might look like if Americans had a president who cared as much about his duties as he does about his ballroom.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post New reporting sheds light on unsettling reason Trump’s first ballroom architect quit appeared first on MS NOW.
