Is the New Message of Trump’s White House "Power First, People Last"?

A palace rising on public ground while the affordability crisis tightens its grip isn't just bad optics, it’s a betrayal of the idea of America…

The White House has always mattered because of what it represents. It was never supposed to be a palace; it was meant to be the people’s house, a physical reminder that power in America is borrowed, temporary, and accountable.

That’s why the news that Donald Trump is turning it into a 400 million dollar monument to himself should stop every American cold.

This isn’t a routine renovation. What Trump first floated as a ballroom has ballooned into a massive two story complex with sweeping staircases, private residential quarters, and a secure bridge connecting it directly to the presidential residence.

Streets around the White House will be shut down for years. Historic gardens are being ripped out. A magnolia planted by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 is gone. Jackie Kennedy’s legacy is treated like landscaping debris.

And this thing won’t just sit on the White House grounds: according to the National Park Service, it will dominate them. It visually overwhelms the West Wing and the Executive Mansion.

That detail matters. Symbols matter. And this symbol screams something Trump has been telling us for years. In his mind, this country isn’t about shared sacrifice or common good, it’s about power, spectacle, and who gets to live above the law and above the rest of us.

While Trump is building himself a palace, millions of Americans are deciding whether they can afford to see a doctor. Parents are cutting pills in half. Seniors are rationing insulin.

Working people are drowning under rent, groceries, student loans, and insurance premiums that climb every year. We’re told healthcare just wasn’t meant to be, that there’s no money for universal care, no money to make life affordable, no money to help people survive.

Funny how there’s always money for marble, steel, and ego when Trump (or any other dictator, anywhere in the world) is running the show. This is how authoritarianism announces itself, and he’s not even trying to be subtle about it.

Strongmen don’t just seize power, they remake the landscape to reflect it. They build grand halls and private corridors, while separating themselves physically and psychologically from the public. They hang huge banners with their faces on them from public buildings.

And now he’s even slapping his name on the Kennedy Center. It’s obscene.

Look around the world and you’ll see the pattern repeated again and again of civic spaces turn into monuments and humble government buildings becoming fortresses. Leaders of this type — if you could call them “leaders” instead of “tinpot dictators” — stop walking among the people and start hovering above them.

Trump isn’t inventing anything new. He’s following a playbook as old as the Egyptian pharaohs and the Roman emperors.

The “secure bridge” to gain access to the building from the White House residence alone tells you everything you need to know. This is about insulation, about never having to mix with the public, about power flowing smoothly behind locked doors and away from protest, dissent, and accountability.

A president who believes in democracy doesn’t need that, but a president who fears or even hates the people — but craves the wealth and power a corrupt Supreme Court has said he can grab at will — does.

The White House was intentionally modest by design: it was a rebuke to kings and emperors. The White House’s first residents — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — refused to live like royalty because they understood that democracy depends on restraint. Jefferson used to answer the front door in his pajamas.

Trump understands the opposite. He believes any symbol of his own personal power should look expensive, imposing, and permanent, like Trump Tower and his gaudy golf motels. That’s why this project matters far beyond architecture: it’s a declaration of values.

And notice what had to be erased to make room for it. Historic gardens. Living symbols of past presidents who believed in stewardship rather than self-glorification.

Authoritarian types like Trump and Putin don’t preserve history, they overwrite it. They don’t see themselves as part of a long democratic story, but instead put themselves at the center of it.

There’s a lawsuit now from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pointing out the obvious, that no president gets to tear apart the White House without review. Not Trump. Not anyone.

Yet a federal judge appears ready to let it move forward, asking only that designs be submitted after the fact. That’s how democratic guardrails weaken. Excess becomes normalized, deference replaces oversight, and power gets a pass because Trump insists he’s a special boy.

This is what Americans are reacting to, even if they don’t always have the language for it. People feel the imbalance in their bones.

They hear Republicans telling them to tighten their belts while loosening their own and those of the morbidly rich who own them. They see suffering framed as unavoidable while luxury is treated as destiny. They understand, instinctively, that something is deeply wrong when a president builds himself a palace while calling unrealistic things like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and providing healthcare to the people.

This moment matters because of what it reveals about the direction Republicans and the morbidly rich are taking our country. A democracy is supposed to make power feel smaller than the people, as the old quote usually misattributed to Jefferson notes:

“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

Trump wants to make power seem untouchable and the people to fear him and his masked goons.

This isn’t about taste or aesthetics. It’s about whether America remains a republic or slides toward something darker. When leaders wall themselves off, elevate themselves physically above the public, and replace shared civic symbols with personal monuments, history warns us where that road leads.

The White House belongs to We, the People.

Every garden, every hallway, every inch of it exists because this country has repeatedly, for over 250 years, rejected kings. Turning it into a private palace while Americans are told to accept illness, debt, and precarity as fate isn’t just obscene, it’s a warning.

Democracies don’t collapse in a single moment. They erode as excess is excused and power forgets who it serves. This project is Trump saying the quiet part out loud: He’s not here to govern with us, he’s here to rule above us.

And Americans are right to reject that.

Louise’s Daily Song: “A Palace for the Powerful”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social