For several months, President Donald Trump has been talking about the massive gaudy ballroom that he thinks is needed at the White House. In July, Trump said of the ballroom’s impact on the White House’s East Wing, “It’ll be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”
Last week, construction crews completely demolished the East Wing of the White House without any input whatsoever from historians or structural preservationists. The East Wing as we know it (well, as we knew it) dates to 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned the structure to add necessary wartime working space to the White House as well as to conceal a fortified underground bunker added for emergency use by the president and key staff.
The East Wing has had a rich history, including as the part of the White House that half a dozen first ladies worked out of. It took only about three days to destroy 83 years of presidential history. This from the same administration that just had D.C.’s only Confederate statute reinstalled while crowing the same tired lies you always hear from the right about how much they love and feel the need to preserve history whenever it’s a monument to racism they want to protect rather than the East Wing of the effing White House.
At any rate, the Trump administration has been bragging about how Trump’s new ballroom will not be taxpayer funded, but will instead be funded by private donors. I mean, taxpayers still aren’t getting compensated for the total destruction of the historical East Wing of the White House that we already owned, but sure.
Also I don’t really see how the president selling influence to giant corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals is going to be better for us than the waste of a few hundred million more tax dollars by the administration that just made history of its own by ballooning America’s national debt by an additional $1 trillion in the span of only two months. Nevertheless, along with some of the usual suspects when it comes to facilitating presidential corruption in this administration, the list of donors to the ballroom project provided by the Trump administration also contains some very big, mainstream names, including a few companies I do business with myself.
One of those companies is my cellphone service provider, T-Mobile. Though it is on the expensive side compared to some of its competitors, I have generally been very happy with T-Mobile (thanks, T-Mobile, for providing cellphone service that held up while I was recently traveling in Ukraine even through “missiles and drones raining down on the Lviv region”).
I contacted T-Mobile US Media Relations with the following questions:
- I understand that the T-Mobile donation was made to the Trust for the National Mall. How was T-Mobile approached about making this donation?
- Who, specifically, approached T-Mobile about its donation?
- Was T-Mobile aware that its donation would be used to fund construction of the new White House ballroom at the time that T-Mobile agreed to make the donation?
- How much did T-Mobile donate or pledge to donate?
- Were any conversations had between anyone at T-Mobile and any official in which both this donation as well as business pertaining to the Trump Mobile network and/or Liberty Mobile Wireless came up?
- Was anything promised, whether expressly or implicitly, to T-Mobile in return for making this donation?
- Does T-Mobile support the complete demolition of the East Wing of the White House?
I received a response a few hours later that, although not perfectly tailored to my questions, proved enlightening on its own merits. Here it is, verbatim, attributed to T-Mobile as instructed:
Ahead of America’s 250th Anniversary, T-Mobile donated to the Trust for the National Mall, which partners with the National Park Service to restore and enrich the historic landmarks that define our nation’s capital, such as the White House ballroom.
T-Mobile has no role in the use of those funds or decisions related to the construction of the ballroom.
Perhaps I’m being lied to – T-Mobile has a lot more to lose by offending Donald Trump than it does by offending me – but I don’t think so. I even happen to know a little about plans for the U.S. Semiquincentennial which helps me read between the lines here a little to understand that most of these plans long predate Trump’s second term.
Of course, as we’ve seen repeatedly, Trump is going to throw pretty much all the plans that predate his second term right out the window, along with possibly throwing away the window itself. Likely T-Mobile did not know this when it made its donation. Quite possibly T-Mobile, and perhaps other companies tagged as donors for the ballroom by the Trump administration, did not even know that Trump would be elected president at the time the funds were donated.
Beyond wanting to generally make money, I do not know what is in the cold, metallic, metaphorical heart of a giant corporation like T-Mobile. That being said, it sure seems to me that their involvement in this whole East Wing fiasco is based largely on Trump raiding funds that should have been used for something else – one of his signature moves, really – and amounts to a donation made in good faith gone awry. In other words, quite possibly Trump is abusing his position (who’d have thunk it?) and is now using a false implication of support from mainstream companies in an attempt to prop up a facade of legitimacy over his White House ballroom debacle.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].