Because the Media Research Center defends everything involving Donald Trump, it made sure to defend the ballroom he plans to attach to the White House. It started with an Aug. 1 post by Jorge Bonilla unloading on onetime bashing target du jour John Dickerson:
Another day, another pompous and passive-aggressive editorial by CBS’s John Dickerson to close out the Evening News Plus. This time, viewers were subjected to Dickerson’s grand pensées on the just-announced White House Ballroom.
[…]The ballroom is going to be privately funded by President Donald Trump, among other donors. But this didn’t stop Dickerson from going back nearly 200 years to find something he thought was historically comparable.
The editorial was little more than a diatribe thinly disguised as a high-minded history lesson. But Dickerson’s literary-historical flex is somewhat inaccurate.
[…]Dickerson gave the game away right at the beginning: “His opponents wanted to turn the trappings of his office into a vulnerability.” So, too, is Dickerson, nearly two hundred years later.
As demolition began on the White House’s East Wing to make room for the massive ballroom, Bonilla returned for an Oct. 20 post:
CBS’s Weijia Jiang found herself on the CBS Evening News complaining about the ballroom currently under construction in the East Wing of The White House. This was NOT how she’d planned her evening to turn out.
[…]Having exhausted all other narrative options when it comes to the White House ballroom, the legacies play up the tired shutdown optics angle. This is what Jiang held until the very last line of her tiny brief- to get in that last narrative hit edgewise in what is otherwise a harmless story.
The ballroom is being financed with private funding, and creates working-class jobs in Washington, D.C. which are, AGAIN, privately-funded. The story is really a dud but, for Jiang, it was a final fallback from the story she REALLY wanted to report.
Bonilla did not explain why harping on the fact that the ballroom will be paid for with private funding — many of whose donors have conflicts of interest with the Trump White House — makes the situation any better.
Nicholas Fondacaro whined in an Oct. 21 post:
Someone apparently taught the liberal ladies of The View a new vocabulary word overnight because they kept throwing around the word “nihilist” to describe President Trump during Tuesday’s episode. The cast was up in arms about the construction of the White House’s new ballroom; claiming that it was evidence that Trump thinks “he is a king” and a “one-man wrecking ball” with “no purpose other than an impulse to destroy” (it’s unclear how that squared with building something new).
“It’s a very bad look right now to be building and demolishing and all this gold tacky crap that he loves!” shouted co-host Joy Behar. She also described Trump as a “one-man wrecking ball.”
It was Behar who got the notation to look up “nihilist” and teach it to the rest of them. Despite the fact the demolition of a small part of the White House was being undertaken to build something more, she bloviated about how Trump was only interested in destruction:
Demolition of the entire East Wing is not “a small part of the White House,” and Fondacaro did not explain how it could possibly be. He also refused to come to the defense of Trump’s “gold tacky crap.”
Mark Finkelstein had his regular meltdown over Joe Scarborough in an Oct. 23 post:
A long-time Joe Scarborough shtick is to facetiously ask historian Jon Meacham about the causes of the French and Indian War.
But someday in the future, when the causes of the Second American Revolution are discussed, at the top of the list might well be President Trump’s decision to build a new White House ballroom.
If you believe Meacham, that is.
On today’s Morning Joe, panel regular and former Biden speechwriter Meacham began by warning the panel, and liberals at large, “Let’s not bang on our high chairs here,” i.e., let’s not overreact to Trump’s ballroom moves.
[…]In saying that Trump has decided to “do it because [he] can,” Meacham acknowledged that the president is acting within his lawful powers. The American Revolution occurred because the colonists had no say or representation in the English King’s decisions. Here, Americans had representation, and they used it to elect Donald Trump president — twice.
Did any of those Americans sign off on Trump’s ballroom? Not that we’re aware.