Trump's Pathetic Führer-Ballsaal

BUILDER TYRANTS can't accept death. Not one has ever undersood that a real legacy is leaving behind something truly beneficial, even if no one ever knows your name.

A still from the movie The Monuments Men (Columbia) shows Hitler adoring a model of his proposed FührerMuseum, which would be built to house the massive hordes of art looted from European great houses and museums and from the Jews he slaughtered in concentration camps. More on this must-see movie in a moment.

Must-reads on this:

• This Washington Post backgrounder has excellent graphics with cutaways to show you just what a gluttonously huge enormity this addition is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/25/trump-white-house-ballroom-east-wing/

• Arwa Mahdawi’s brief, cogent article on why the ballroom probably means Trump intends to run for a third term. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/25/why-is-trump-demolishing-the-white-houses-east-wing-because-he-wants-to

• Best of the litter: Paul Krugman’s excellent Substack article “Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic: Tackiness and Tyranny go hand in hand.” at https://substack.com/home/post/p-176956857

The Gift That Is The Monuments Men

This is going to seem strange, but this started for me with a largely passed-over movie called The Monuments Men. The movie was based on the 2009 New York Times Best Seller of the same name by Robert M. Edsel, the publisher’s description of which ran like this:

In a race against time, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture by Nazis.

George Clooney and Grant Heslov wrote the screenplay from Edsel’s book, which told the story of just some of the 5,000,000 pieces of art stolen by the Nazis at Hitler’s behest because the dictator wanted to immortalize himself with a museum park—the Führermuseum—a complex of buildings vast it would virtually overtake the city of Linz in Austria, near where he was born.

Hitler in front of the model of the Führermuseum in 1945. Photographer unknown. Image in the public domain by date.

Columbia Pictures produced the film with a couple of other studies and released it in 2014. The Monuments Men had a stellar case: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett. It suffered from the fact that it was a war movie with virtually no battles: it was war by more intelligent means; it was a war to save the human family’s intellectual and artistic treasures.

The movie turned a profit, but it got mixed reviews. This is a thinking person’s war movie, like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, Come and See, or Dr. Strangelove. It failed with the “shoot-em-up” crowd, and but it was a gift to human knowledge then, and it is now.

The Monuments Men is a film every contemporary American should see not only because it tells the rather quiet story of Paris museum employee “Claire Simone” (fashioned after the real-life Resistance hero Rose Valland), who is played by Cate Blanchett. As Valland did, she manages to track what the Nazis are stealing and where they are sending the finest art ever produced—paintings, sculptures, sketches—and a team that would discover a huge cache of it (and something else of immense value in the process) and make sure as much of it as possible made its way home.

Note: Not mentioned in the book or the movie is the work of Jacques Jaujard, the curator of The Louvre, and his protector, Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, director of the Kunstschutz, the German military organization that protected of art in France and Europe in World War II. The Kunstschutz acted against people who carried out art theft, in particular against Hermann Göring and Reichsleiter Rosenberg, despite the fact they were German.

Hitler had raided every unprotected museum in areas that the Nazis had overtaken and that the Kunstschutz couldn’t protect—and gutted the collections of every Jewish citizen and art dealer whom he had sent to concentration camps and gassed.

One twist here is that Hitler had given an order that if it became clear that the Nazis would lose the war, all the art should be destroyed. If the art wasn’t to have HIS name on it, nobody would ever get to enjoy it again. This turned the efforts of the Monuments Men into a race against time.

---

---

The Builder Tyrants

The ultimate point of the behavior that Hitler engaged in—the absolute lust to see himself immortalized in great monuments adorned with the world’s best art—is that Hitler, like rest of the “Builder Tyrants” doesn’t accept death. It is probably true that all of us want to leave a legacy behind when we die, but that legacy, most of us feel, needs to be something that improves the lives of others, not that aggrandizes the memory of ourselves. Something real: a good Constitution, the discovery of antibiotics, a 19th Amendment, the abolition of slavery, a hand in a trip to the moon, saving books from being banned and being burned, the art on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the music of Mozart, the humble neighborhood free library truck bumping along the potholed street in a slum, the exposure of a place like Love Canal, the brave book by a person known as “Nobody’s Child.” It is the work of a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education. It is a rape case brought by an 80-year-old writer against a president of the United States. It is the salt march of an aging Hindu. It is the voice of a civil rights leader echoing across the National Mall even as he knows its ringing will cost him his life.

This is legacy. It has nothing to do with buildings and everything to do with soul. And vanity architecture can never fill the void that makes it seem attractive.

Who are the Builder Tyrants? Here’s a Short List:

• Pharaohs of Egypt. Though it’s unlikely that Egypt’s fantastic pyramids were primarily tombs—they may have been more for religious ceremony—there is no question that the Cheops, as well as the Temple at Karnak, and particularly the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, as well as many tombs in the Valley of the Kings, were about ensuring the memory of the importance of a particular person. Well, they’re still dead, aren’t thye?

• The Roman Emperor Nero, as well as fiddling whilst the city burnt, built the extravagant Domus Aurea, a lavish palace in Rome. He died, you know.

• The Conqueror Kublai Khan commissioned the construction of Xanadu, a luxurious summer palace, as monument to himself. He’s dead, too.

• Louis XIV of France expanded the Palace of Versailles into a symbol of his absolute monarchy and as a tribute to himself. He died, too.

• Joseph Stalin monument to himself is the Moscow Metro, showcasing Soviet power and grandeur. Happily, he’s off-planet as well.

• Saddam Hussein built to the Al-Faw Palace in Iraq, as well as many other opulent palaces and monuments, as fawning kowtows to himself. He would up in a spidey-hole in the Iraqi desert and was then executed.

Why Not the Taj Mahal?

Why not the Taj Mahal? Because not all great monuments are craven little Vanity Projects. The Taj was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a resting place for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It is an immortal act of love.

The Taj is like the Statue of Liberty or the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia or the Freedom Tower in Bulgaria. It symbolizes something of the most extraordinary value to whole peoples.

The Taj is like the Library of Congress, a tribute to knowledge, or like the Pantheon in Paris where are buried Victor Hugo, Marie and Pierre Curie, Alexandre Dumas, Voltaire, Émile Zola, Louis Braille—and Josephine Baker.

The Taj is like the quiet walk that is the Pere Lechaise Poet’s Cemetery, resting place of Edith Piaf, Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein—and Jim Morrison.

The Taj is like The Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, the British Museum, The Met, the Vatican Museums, the Prada, the National Galleries in London and Washington, the Smithsonian, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Rijksmuseum in Amersterdam, and the Uffizi in Florence.

The Taj is like the red-cliff Petra in Jordan, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the stratospheric ruins of Machu Pichu in Peru, St. Peter’s Basilica, Chartres, Notre Dame in Paris, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

All these edifices immortalize not people, but the intangibles of human life that have true value: love, art, excellence, freedom, discovery, literature, science, and devotion to the holy. None of that has anything to do with fawning to somebody’s ego.

Soul Death in the Tomb of Psychological Greed

The psychology here is that such tyrants are grasping at the rottenest of straws that disintegrate in their hands—and, as is always true with seeking self-esteem through attention from others, it’s insatiable. Outside validation does NOT create self-esteem—it only makes the craving for attention worse and worse and worse.

Trump is in the grip of this deadly addiction. And it is the worst addiction of all, because it drives him destroy things of real value, upon which he tramples in the sandbox of arrested development, smashing everything.

The White House is not his house. And I don’t care if, as Chelsea Clinton wrote yesterday, that Trump has the technical right to destroy a national monument—a national treasure saved by Dolly Madison when the British set fire to it! He has no moral right to do so.

This ballroom, which will dwarf and tawdrify the White House, won’t be enough. Trump, who intends, as Mahdawi writes, to be in the White House long enough to see the ballroom finished during a third term, won’t be satisfied because he cannot be satisfied on his present course. Like every addict, he’ll need more. And he’ll destroy more. But the only things that make it possible for really terrible tyrants to temporarily escape a burning sense of inadequacy and impotence—and it’s only ever temporary—is to build BIGLY and put their names on the stuff they build—to destroy other people’s things, in this case OUR things—and to abuse the vulnerable (ref: pussy-grabbing and rape) and/or to kill endangered leopards in Africa or heavily outgunned Colombians on the high seas without a declaration of war.

Trump knows nothing of love’s boundaries or decency’s limits. Trump has no “muscle” to observe, monitor or change his behavior. Guardrails have to be set for him, and the Supreme Court, with Citizens United and Immunity removed them all.

As Mahdawi comments today, he will do anything he wants and can get away with.

Trump can’t hear his soul. He has one. But he can’t hear it anymore. It’s been silenced by the particularly deadly kind of psychological greed that plagues his every waking moment and rots his every action.

It is up to us to protect our democracy and our freedom from all such people.

The Questions We Must Ask Now

The $300-million-dollar price tag for this ugly act of vanity is being paid for by America’s billionaires. Trump’s comment was the $300-million-dollar tab for his vanity ballroom, which he has craved since having dinner at Windsor Castle, would be paid for “by me and my friends.”

Friends=billionaires ever on the heavy take from the U.S. government. When Trump says that American taxpayers will pay nothing, that’s a lie. We’re going to pay for it by subsidizing these billionaires’ tax breaks, by the cash handouts we make to their industries, which also won’t be taxed, and by the fact that regulations that protect us will be trashed by the likes of people like Russell Vought. The companies these people represent will get a pass on fair business and labor practices and get every encouragement to keep stampeding to the trough no matter the impact on Americans’ safety, health, and freedom.

We need to start keeping tabs on how Trump pays them back. Ask the really pertinent question: WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM?

And … get thee to the polls.

See The Monuments Men

AND see The Monuments Men, an invaluable movie for understanding the Builder Tyrant mindset.

A scene from The Monuments Men (Columbia).

The Monuments Men is currently streaming on Amazon and Apple TV.

Next time: Why the Trump Boys’ killing of a threatened African leopard is an analog to Trump’s and Hegseth’s shooting Colombian boats in a barrel right now.

More soon ..