Don the Builder

"Can you fix it?"

Hotel Commodore, on East 42nd Street at Lexington, 1970s, via an exceptionally modest blog called "Random Musings". Pretty sure the gray wall at right is the base of the glorious deco Chrysler Building.

And Maggie Haberman comments, in her book promo interview with Ezra Klein, “If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.”

It occurred to me that there’s a reason nobody has figured out yet for this obsession with “renovations” as Maggie calls them, connected with something we’ve understood for a while: that there’s a world where Trump really feels pretty comfortable. Where he has felt comfortable for a good 50 years, since 1975, when he first formed a partnership with the Hyatt Organization to buy the skanky old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan and and spend $100 million to turn it into a Grand Hyatt, is in the guise of Don the Builder (”Can you fix it?” “Yes I can!”).

Don the Builder, 1980, the year the Grand Hyatt opened.

I think it’s that it makes him feel smart—that he knows the vocabulary, what all the words mean, “paver” (I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before, though I can guess), “granite” (that one I knew).

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He spends much of his day immersed in the jobs presidents are supposed to do, weighty matters of state and politics, not actually doing them, you understand, but trying to give the courtiers the impression that he’s in command, and it has to be very stressful, not even knowing whether something is a ship or a boat, talking about a war he knows (from polls) he’s losing but doesn’t have any idea why other than that his people are lying to him (as they certainly are). And his tendency to fabricate, as the other day explaining his order (not actually an order, fortunately) to reduce the number of diseases children should be protected against (giving up on hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, and COVID-19) while expanding their number in some cases (from one shot for measles, mumps and rubella to three separate shots) gets him into regions of incomprehensible strangeness:

“And I saw this early on, and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination thing, looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” Trump said. At other times during his remarks, he compared the amount of vaccines injected into children with a “large glass” or even “seemingly … gallons.”

No, he did not see that, or proof of it. It’s not a thing that exists in the material world.

But when he’s talking about his beautification projects, he’s more tethered to reality. It’s stuff he’s personally experienced, and he knows what it’s called. When he had the lawn of the Rose Garden ripped out and replaced, he explained the decision in rational terms:

“Are you… are you paving over the grass here?” [Laura Ingraham] asked.

“What was happening is, you’re supposed to have events,” Trump replied. “Every event you have, it’s soaking wet. It’s soaking wet. And people can’t– and the women with the high heels, it’s just too much.”

“That’s where you did the Kavanaugh thing and Amy Coney Barrett,” Ingraham said, noting ceremonies for two of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.

“The grass just, it doesn’t work,” Trump added. “And we have a gorgeous stone and everything else. But you know, we use it for press conferences and it doesn’t work because the people fall into the, you know, into the wet, the soaking wet [inaudible].”

He’s still lying, of course, as Ingraham gently points out (I suppose she was there herself for the Kavanaugh and Barrett swearings-in). It’s worth noting that with the only example of a spoiled Rose Garden press conference he ever uses, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “working visit” last February, no source other than Trump himself is ever cited, including in the Hindustan Times which reported it only seven months later), and it doesn’t seem to have included any outdoor events at all—the press conference was held in the Oval. But there is enough realism to the story that you don’t dismiss it immediately (unlike, you know, the ultraviolet suppository Covid cure or the physically impossible theft of the 2020 presidential election).

Similarly, the case of the “pavers”, on the ground-level outdoor path lined by Doric columns that leads from the president’s residential quarters to the Oval Office in the West Wing, which he decorated last year with the Presidential Wall of Fame (complete with the snarky portrait of Joe Biden’s autopen, in keeping with his theory in keeping with his theory that Biden wasn’t handy enough with a pen to be a legitimate president, unlike Trump, who can sign anything with his trusty Sharpie, though he’s not likely to have read it) and large quantities of the apparently golden ornaments he’s been sticking on every available flat vertical surface.

The path has been paved since the massive renovations of 1948-52 in the Truman presidency (done with the consent and appropriated moneys of Congress, of course, and to save the building from actual collapse) with the Tennessee flagstone, the color of which Trump is not crazy about, although I wouldn’t call it really red, see below.

President Donald J. Trump leading Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his special tour last November, before the granite was installed. Photo by Getty Images via New York Post.

Michael Scherer (gift link—you really have to read this) at The Atlantic calls the color “dun”:

Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.

That was the main lie there. Of course it wasn’t paid for by him:

Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.

That is one tip of an iceberg: Trump and his accomplice Russell Vought the Great Impounder have extracted around $100 million from the National Park Service for this kind of thing, together with $310 million in donations from his wealthy friends going mostly to the illegal “ballroom”, while the budget for repairs and maintenance and parks outside the D.C. area is down close to a billion dollars, leaving some 900 projects stranded. And the 2027 budget request is demanding another $10 billion earmarked for capital-area projects while cutting the park service’s annual budget by another $736 million from the $3.2 billion total, at a time of severe financial strain for the agency, which will face steep losses in staffing, after already being early decimated in 2025.

All so the president has something to talk knowledgeably about, flagstone vs. granite, while he’s evading press questions about why he started a war we can’t win or why he’s failed to halt the rise in consumer prices, and sound for a moment less ignorant (though just as tasteless and stupid).