Vanity Vandalism: Trump’s Versailles on the Potomac

Michael Steven Smith

DONALD TRUMP’S GIANT back hoes have knocked down the east wing of the White House to construct a ballroom in his own honor.

The second president of United States, the learned and thoughtful John Adams, lived in “the peoples house” as it became known. Alone in the newly constructed building in 1800, he walked up the stairs to his bedroom lighting the way by a candle to write letters back to his wife Abigail, who stayed at home in Massachusetts attending their farm.

Trump said he loved the White House and wouldn’t touch it. Then he knocked down half of it to build a 90,000 square-foot ballroom. The remaining White House is 33,000 square feet. The ballroom will have gold leaf on the ceiling.

Trump’s Versailles on the Potomac will cost a quarter billion dollars, He got the money to build it from a section of the corporate class.

Hitler’s fascist party, the Nazis, got money from the German capital class. The clothing manufacturer Hugo Boss, the car manufacturers Mercedes and Volkswagen, the manufacturer of the poison gas used in the gas chambers I B Farben…You get the picture.

Ninety years later in America sections of the corporate class are donating to our fascist president. Google gave him $22 million. Palantir gave money. Peter Thiel is a big investor. He’s the man who gave us J. D. Vance by financing his Senate career in Ohio.

Lockheed Martin gave $10 million. They’re a major defense contractor in America, although in keeping with the change of the Defense Department name, we should call Lockheed a war contractor.

Booze Alan Hamilton donated money. They provided advice and surveillance during the Iraq war which killed 500,000 Iraqis.

Nexteraenergy is a contributor. Remember, Trump says that climate changes a “hoax.”

R.J Reynolds donated money. They make cigarettes: Camels, Winston, Pall Mall. Salem and Newport are their menthol line. Cigarettes kill 480,000 Americans a year, 44,000 by secondhand smoke.

German capitalism in the 1930s was threatened by a powerful organized working class. So the German capitalists made a deal with Hitler’s Nazi party. They helped Hitler come to power and in return Hitler crushed the German working class, beginning witht the socialists and communists.

Then he turned on the Jews, whom he scapegoated along with Slavs, Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals and communists.

In America, Trump has made a deal with a section of the capitalist class. Some will get their names sketched in stone on the wall in the new White House ballroom. It is all about access and influence.

Trump calls us “lunatic communists and Marxists.” He scapegoats immigrants and brown people calling them murderers and rapists, getting them snatched up off our streets and deported.

The new gargantuan ballroom is a monument to American fascism. As the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote, in order to honestly talk about fascism you have to talk about capitalism from which it springs. We do — and we talk honestly, unlike the lying vulgarian who wants to take us down even as he builds this monstrosity.

January-February 2026, ATC 240