Why America will celebrate a White House reduced to rubble | Opinion

Perhaps of all the wrong things Donald Trump has done, tearing down a wing of the White House is both the least lastingly awful and the most Trumpy thing he has done yet. While we can rebuild Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan’s home after Trump is gone, bulldozing part of a national shrine crystallizes Trump’s rebellion against the cold damp swampy fog that has hobbled America for so long.

The media didn’t get to hold a debate about it. The bureaucrats didn’t get to follow their precious process. Lawyers didn’t get to file lawsuits. The courts didn’t get to hold hearings. The experts and the professors weren’t consulted. There was no permit application. I hate it.

Trump didn’t care what I thought. He just did it and left the wreckage for all to see. America used to be like that.

What rises from the rebar and ashes is the core of Trump’s appeal to regular folks; it is his idea of American greatness. Something big and bold and gold will arise in the middle of Washington, too gauche for the Guccied swamp legions to approve. I think the rest of America just might come to cheer once the shock passes.

For too long the PhD/MSDNC/JD crowd has argued against our greatness, burying what Americans carry in their hearts under a soggy blanket of self-doubt, constant criticism and red tape. We can’t be great because we have been awful in the past, are awful now and, anyway, if you try, good luck with all the forms.

Trump’s second electoral victory was a cry to return to a time when, for all the flaws we struggle with, we were self-confident and knew we could do great things. The elite class misunderstands what’s going on here. Americans don’t want to return to an older America because we imagine it was perfect, but rather because it was a time when the perfect and beautiful and great were achievable. We could dream of the amazing rather than sitting in an HR seminar learning how people’s dreams are impossible, crushed under all the isms that haunt our past and present.

I was thinking about Trump’s destruction of America’s sacred White House ground this week as that love for American exceptionalism was kindled just a little bit in my children.

At a Cub Scout meeting in the gym of a disheveled brick Presbyterian Church, that yearning for American greatness was growing in my nine-year-old daughter who, surrounded by her fellow Bears and with her chest puffed, carried the American flag down the aisle between rows of folding seats full of parents. She placed it in its stand and somewhat sloppily saluted as the gathered scouts recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

After the awards for scouting adventures were distributed while parents cheered, we went out to a cracked blacktop parking lot where we launched rockets fueled with water and compressed air into the sky. Why? Because America is great and because we could. Girls were everywhere. We can change for the better at the same time we cling to a past that was great and can be again.

If you wonder what Trump’s followers see in him, why a goofy orange corrupt sinner, with a heart as jaded as they come, could steal greater numbers of young and Black and Hispanic votes than a Republican had ever before; this is why. This is why an avatar of the credentialed class was crushed in the 2024 election and why the crazier things Trump does may come to be more popular with his followers and maybe more of us than you think.

Through doing the impossible, through running over the American elite, it feels like he’s giving us back our dreams or, at least, returning to us the sense of possibility that let them grow and sustain us. I fear that it is a mirage.

All it is going to cost us is the Constitution and our Democracy. We’ll be left with rubble, rebar and regret. But without dreams of American greatness, too many of us have decided those are costs we’re willing to pay.

David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star.