Columnist proposes naming ballroom after Renee Good, Alex Pretti
Jan-Werner Müller, a Guardian US columnist and professor of politics at Princeton University, published the column on Tuesday in response to a Supreme Court ruling issued the preceding day. The court majority found what Müller described as “a technical way” to overrule a lower court’s stop-work order without taking a stance on whether the project might be illegal.
Müller wrote that Roberts’ dissent argued “those responsible” were breaking the rules in deciding “what to build up at the People’s House.” Solicitor General John Sauer is on record claiming that 65% of the project is completed, though Müller noted that “such things are known to have happened in Trump administrations.”
The columnist argued the ruling would “embolden the president dramatically to change Washington DC’s landscape by spending money never approved by Congress,” suggesting a triumphal arch could also result.
The column’s central argument drew on philosopher Susan Neiman’s observation that “buildings and monuments make values visible.” Müller compared the ballroom to Confederate monuments, writing that “the decision to leave Trump’s structures in place as if his reign had just been another normal era in US history is not neutral — just like leaving Confederate monuments in place is not neutral.”
He characterized the ballroom as combining what he described as “the shameless corruption, as private companies are invited to ‘donate’ for the project” with “the sheer destructiveness, as the East Wing was brutally torn down without discussion, let alone permission.” Howard Lutnick has publicly raised the prospect of the Kennedy Center being demolished unless Trump is allowed to “renovate” it and put his name on the building, a threat Müller likened to “the abuser’s logic of ‘if I cannot have it, no one can have it.’”
Müller noted that several Democratic politicians have begun weighing in on the structure’s future. California Governor Gavin Newsom said “we have to be builders” and would leave the building in place. Senator Chris Murphy suggested that all “dirty” — which Müller noted “seems to mean: corrupt” — Trump-era projects might need to be removed. Senator Ruben Gallego proposed selling the ballroom off “piece by piece,” though the column acknowledged “it is unclear whether that would be some sort of political performance art, intended as a comment on corruption, or an act of symbolic catharsis, copying the way people demolished the Berlin wall piece by piece.”
Congressman Jamie Raskin and political figure Saikrat Chakrabarti suggested the ballroom be partly converted to exhibition space documenting what Raskin described as attempts to “undermine and thwart popular democracy in American life.” Raskin also said he wanted to preserve space for dining, a detail Müller noted could leave guests “awkwardly sipping champagne next to depictions of January 6.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed converting the building into a soup kitchen, an idea Müller described as “worthy” even as he argued it would teach less of a history lesson than his own suggestion.
Müller’s own proposal: rename the edifice after Renee Good and Alex Pretti, writing that “this could teach a history lesson in a way that, for instance, turning the ballroom into a soup kitchen, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has suggested, might not.”
The column also cited historical precedents for handling buildings associated with authoritarian rulers. In Venice’s Doge’s Palace, Müller noted, portraits of all the Doges hang except one — Doge Marino Faliero, who attempted a coup — which is painted over with a black shroud. In Germany, he wrote, the refusal to keep Hitler street names was essential to regaining international trust.
Müller closed by arguing that any future American government’s credibility abroad would depend on “a thorough repudiation” of “Trumpism,” which he characterized as a period during which “the whims and obsessions of one evidently incompetent con man wreaked havoc with old alliances.”