The Brooklyn Rail

There has been a lot of speculation about how the presidential bunker under the now-demolished East Wing of the White House is figuring into the plans for Trump’s massive “ballroom.” When Trump said the military was involved in plans for his new ballroom, this is presumably what he was referring to. The White House Military Office is indeed handling the renovation of the President’s Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. When built in 1942, the bunker was designed to withstand a direct nuclear hit.

Trump himself spent a night in the bunker on May 29, 2020, when protesters gathered outside the White House after the murder of George Floyd and he got scared they were coming for him. When his flight to the bunker was reported in the press, prompting the hashtag “#bunkerboy” to trend on Twitter, Trump demanded that officials find out who had leaked the information, and proclaimed that the person who did this “should be tried for treason and should be executed.” Tom Hanks’s son Colin described the incident as a metaphor for the first Trump term: “Trump is not a leader. He knows it in his bones. He is a coward. Turning off the lights, pretending no one is home while hiding out in a bunker.” And now the metaphor for the second Trump term is the accelerated demolition of a section of The People’s House in order to build a monument to his own ego, perhaps over a bunker to accommodate his wealthy donors.

The existing bunker reportedly has a sealed, airtight door and is stocked with its own air and food supplies. Trump has been planning to upgrade this bunker for some time. Trump grew up in the Cold War period when the fear of a nuclear attack from Russia was real for many people and the reality of bomb shelters was upon us. He has always appealed directly to the prepper tendency, and has undoubtedly spent considerable time figuring out a way to protect himself and his wealthy friends in the case of a foreign attack or scary civil unrest at home.

The way Trump and his minions characterized the more than 7 million protesters on No Kings Day II on October 18 was ridiculous and telling, in direct proportion to how effectively the protesters ridiculed Trump and the weak Trump regime and demonstrated the apposite strength of the People.

Remember that Trump’s entry into the presidential race was partly driven by President Barack Obama’s merciless ridiculing of Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, ending with, “Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some changes to the White House,” while projecting an image of the White House facade in full Atlantic City glitz, with gold encrusted columns, a gigantic chandelier, and the TRUMP brand emblazoned above it all.

The protests in more than 2700 cities and towns across America on October 18 were joined by just a fraction of the Americans who have had enough of Trump’s authoritarian takeover, but the number willing to speak out in public is growing. Many of the protesters on October 18 came from the generation of 1968, when a popular uprising skewered an incoming administration rushing toward authoritarianism and eventually defeated them.

The people who are waiting for the midterm elections a year from now to stand up against Trump are making two possibly fatal mistakes. One: at the current rate, Trump will have completely dismantled the democratic infrastructure in the US by November 2026, possibly beyond repair. Two: also by that time, the electoral system, in any case, may be otherwise compromised.

In addition to the super-gerrymandering to guarantee more Republican seats in many states, barring voting by mail (on advice from Putin), and nullifying the census, The New York Times just reported that Trump has already slashed all federal programs protecting election apparatus and security and has tried to make the federal executive branch supreme in running elections. The latter effort is unconstitutional and is being challenged in the courts, but nothing has been resolved so far. Trump has also put election deniers from the 2020 presidential election into key offices in the federal government. Heather Honey, who was central to the absurd Maricopa County audit in Arizona after the 2020 election, is now the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem.

Currently, elections are run by state and local governments. But right-wing election activists plan to declare a “National Emergency” in order to seize more federal control. They may do this by re-opening an investigation into the nonexistent “fraud” in the 2020 election. The Department of Justice, which has protected voting rights in the past, is now demanding a “national voter roll,” to make it possible for operatives to influence voters and to search out and manufacture new incidents of partisan “fraud” in order to invalidate unwanted election results.¹ If some of these tactics are successful in derailing the midterms, they will be used in subsequent elections.

In an interview with The Economist on October 23, Steve Bannon said, “Trump is going to be president in ‘28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there is a plan.” Bannon then said that Trump is “an instrument of divine will.”²