Transcription
JEFFREY EPSTEIN? All in. All in. Starts right now. Good evening from New York, I'm Chris Hayes.
The East Wing of the White House has been reduced to rubble. Donald Trump, unilaterally and irreversibly destroyed an entire wing of the People's House to build a ballroom that he wants. It will be almost twice the size of the actual White House. And according to ABC News, he wants to name it after himself. Shocker.
There has been an outpouring of rage and repulsion from the American public in response to these images. Flash polling shows people do not like the president destroying an icon of our democracy on a whim. One historian, telling the Associated Press that demolishing the East Wing demeans the history of the Office of the First Lady, which has historically operated from the East Wing.
"I was devastated. I was really devastated. I was because we had heard that they were going to save this building, and now it seems they didn't. To me, the devastating piece of it was not so much the building, but the attitude kind of behind the destruction, which basically said that the First Lady's work doesn't really matter to this administration, that it's not important."
Reuters caught up with tourists in Washington who witnessed the demolition firsthand, and they were not pleased with what they saw.
"I knew about it months, like, a month ago when they first put out the pictures of that awful SpaceX building. And when they said it was going to be 90,000 square feet and the White House is only 55,000 square feet. My job. I thought it was a typo. I thought, you can't just do that."
"Not me. It's exactly what I expect from that idiot. I think it's incredibly unfortunate. I think he was dishonest about his intent in terms of 'we're not going to touch anything like it's going to be close but not touching.' And then, you know, we're completely demolishing it. It's not clear who's paying for it. I know he says there's donors, but, you know."
"I live in Texas and Mexico is going to pay for the wall."
Reuters also captured three trucks carrying the rubble from what once was the East Wing. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I remember seeing it and unceremoniously dumping it at a nearby public golf course in Washington. The Washington Post reports the dirt will be used to create new mounds for golfers who won't even know they're playing by mounds that once were part of those hallowed halls.
It's also not clear if anyone is being paid for that rubble, and if so, where the money is going. In fact, to be totally honest, as per usual, a lot is not clear about the cost of Trump's ballroom.
"President Trump and other donors have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million structure. It will be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world. It's about $300 million. That's an interior of the ballroom, and it's the highest level."
"Have you raised the full $300 million needed to fund your ballroom? And how much specifically are you donating to this construction?"
"I think $350 million."
"200, 250, 300, 350. Do I hear four?"
To be clear, we do not know what the true cost is and why it keeps going up. We basically have no idea about any of this. And we have, of course, no reason to take the White House at its word.
Democratic senators are demanding answers. A group of them are out with a letter to the National Park Service, as well as the trust that is collecting forms from the donors for the construction, accusing Trump of misleading the public about the scope and cost of the project. Senators want to know specifically, "When the project began, we're trust officials under the impression it would cost $200 million?" and "When did trust officials become aware the project would cost $300 million and involve the complete destruction of the East Wing?"
That trust, the Trust for the National Mall, is actually facing quite a few questions this week after Huffington Post published the list of donors to the ballroom. Now, that list, we should note, includes, for parent company, Comcast, as well as a bunch of other large corporations that could potentially have business before the White House. In fact, in some level, they all do, right? If the White House controls the entire regulatory state, as it currently says it does.
We do not know much about what these companies donated, or if they knew where the money was going, or under what circumstances or what the conversations were like. Except there is one case. We know a little more about that's Alphabet, the company that owns Google. So we know they donated $22 million to fund the ballroom and get this: we know that because the money came as part of a settlement in Trump's lawsuit against the company. You see, Donald Trump sued a bunch of tech companies back right after that happened in 2021, after they banned his accounts following his incitement of a deadly and violent insurrection on January 6th, that resulted in many injuries and multiple deaths. And once Trump became president again, he realized he could just bully his way into enormous payments from a who's who of companies that have a lot of business before the U.S. So Alphabet, which owns YouTube, which kicked Trump off, settled with Trump for $22 million. And Meta, formerly Facebook, agreed to pay $22 million to fund Trump's future presidential library. And Elon Musk's X settled for $10 million, much of which went to Trump directly. For The Wall Street Journal, Trump also sued a number of media companies and got settlements. Disney and Paramount both donated about $15 million to Trump's library to settle lawsuits after the election.
Now, again, we should note there's very little regulation surrounding how a sitting president can fundraise for the presidential library. But while these settlements are an avenue for Trump to shake down the media and big tech, the real grift comes from the crypto industry, and cryptocurrency is, by design, almost impossible to track. Anyone can spend very large sums of money in ways that directly benefit the Trump family. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports the Trump family has been raking in billions of dollars in paper and crypto wealth since the election. This might be the most lucrative thing Donald Trump has ever done, as the Journal reports, quote, "A major reason for the success is a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump." Well, spoiler alert, did he get the pardon?
This week, Donald Trump pardoned the founder of Binance, who was released from prison late last year after pleading guilty to charges related to money laundering.
"Trump says he's not really sure what this is all about."
"Today you pardoned the founder of Binance. Can you explain why you chose to pardon him? And did it have anything to do with his involvement in which one who is the founder of Binance, he has a involvement in Europe crypto?"
"Yes, the I believe we're talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people I don't know. He was recommended by a lot of people."
"Which one was that?"
"I do pardon a lot of people."
The Journal reports this will likely clear the way for the company to, yes, you guessed it, resume operations in the U.S. Pretty difficult to give the benefit of the doubt here. There has been so much obvious, transparent corruption by this administration. And now not only has Trump metaphorically destroyed the dignity of the White House, he has literally destroyed it as well.
Jamelle Bouie is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Doug Brinkley is a presidential historian and professor of history at Rice University. And they join me now.
Doug, let me start with you. I have seen a lot of very strong reactions from historians. And obviously, look, things change, buildings get changed. You know, there's a lot of changes are kind of constant. But there's something about this that does seem like to represent some kind of break of some sort. How have you been sort of understanding it?
"I believe it is a big break because going to be part of history, because of that whole that that that we're looking at. We're living in a visual age and we're looking at the East Wing right now. And we were promised by the president in an open-handed, supposedly goodwill gesture, that he was building a ballroom that wouldn't touch the East Wing. Really not touch it. And then, boom, the wrecking ball comes, ignoring anybody and anybody who says it's not a beautiful moment gets nuked by the Trump administration. They're destroying gardens. They're taking out trees of presidents. It's a Willy-nilly approach to all of this. And the American people won't like it. And it's going to live on in history forever. It's like a symbol of Trumpism, a wrecking ball to the White House. And so it was a political boondoggle for Donald Trump. If he was going to build it, then be a little more generous with the American public. Instead, he's defied history and has lied about this. There's no other way to explain it. His hope might be someday there's a ballroom that's gold and pretty well if you're judging it by the Trump Tower, New York City. It's like the most heinous building in Manhattan. It is the president who made up fake Renoir paintings that he doesn't own. Then they say it's new. He didn't even know what it is. It was just self-aggrandizement."
"I continue to kind of have my breath taken away by the routinization of corruption, so egregious that it would be like, obviously, administration ending it any other period. I mean, even just like, look at the Hunter Biden stuff, where it's like his son may have had some contact and sat on a board like the president's son has sits on the board of a drone company that got a huge contract today, and that's like the 15th most urgent corruption story we got. Yeah."
"There is a clear double standard for Trump. That's all it is. I don't understand the nature of the double standard, but there isn't a clear and obvious double standard for Trump that there is the political world. The political press, frankly, looks at other politicians and evaluates them according to the norms we've had for decades. Right? If any other politician had a child running a crypto, whatever, and getting hundreds of millions of billions of dollars funneled to them, there would be a serious investigation by the political press. It would be a major scandal. But with Trump, there's this idea that because he has no particular virtue, no particular commitment to transparency, but because he ignores all propriety, that therefore we do as well, that there's"