Trump has been humbled over his pet project. Even when he’s right, his obsession hurts him

For all the legal cases involving Donald Trump’s decisions as US president, the saga of his renovations to the White House is among the most ridiculous.

A three-judge panel of the second most important court in the country halted construction on Trump’s White House renovations, forcing him to take the matter to the Supreme Court if he wants to complete his pet project.

The Court of Appeals found that Trump was merely a tenant of the White House, no more permitted to demolish a wing of the building than I am to knock down a wall in my rented apartment. We can both make aesthetic changes, but anything permanent must be approved by the owner. In Trump’s case, the owner is the American people, which means Congress gets a say.

That distinction between occupying a place and owning it is one Trump has spent much of his second presidential term testing.

The renovation project began with Trump unilaterally demolishing the 123-year-old East Wing for a new, privately financed and gilded ballroom. As outrage grew about his destruction of a piece of American history, his justification shifted toward that of national security, and improvements to the underground bunker housing the Presidential Emergency Operations Centre.

As a real estate mogul, Trump could control the aesthetics even when he did not own the underlying asset: his name in gold letters on buildings for which he accepted little financial responsibility. He did the same thing with his crypto endorsements, profiting by applying his brand to World Liberty Financial and Trump meme coin without bearing the risk. He has shown that same obsession with branding in his approach to government.

When Trump wanted to reshape the White House to his liking, he could have gone to Congress, which has denied him little in his second term, and asked for a larger entertaining space, more secure facilities, or both. Instead, impatient, he chose the route that required him to possess a power he did not have.

Trump wanted a resplendent entertaining space, and because he has encountered few meaningful checks on his power as president, he began building one on his own authority.

The courts have otherwise given Trump wide room to manoeuvre. By appointing hundreds of judges to lifetime positions on the federal bench he has reshaped the judiciary to be more conservative and overtly political, and the vast majority of the Supreme Court’s rulings in his second term have gone his way.

But even a court to which he appointed a third of the justices has generally maintained that the US president cannot manufacture authority where Congress or the Constitution has withheld it.

The Supreme Court ruled against his attempt to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, with two Trump appointees concluding that he could not simply unwind the 14th Amendment. His own court appointees likewise killed his global tariff regime, rejecting his attempt to turn a narrow statute into a sweeping grant of presidential power. They also found that he lacked the authority to deploy the National Guard over the wishes of a state’s governor.

Now the man elected to drain the swamp has become obsessed with landscaping it.

Trump made his name in 2016 by selling Washington as a place that had betrayed ordinary Americans and promised that only he could absolve it of its sins. Ten years later, that absolution has taken literal form, with his face on new passports, his likeness on Treasury minted coins, his name attached to the ballroom and Washington’s Kennedy Centre for the arts, and his 250-foot (76-metre) arch designed to cast a shadow toward America’s most hallowed ground at the Arlington cemetery.

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times estimates that these projects now occupy about 70 per cent of any conversation with Trump. Each project aims at leaving another mark on a city he does not own.

After damage appeared in the newly renovated Reflecting Pool, Trump pinned the blame on vandals and other enemies, including a former Olympian. His Justice Department initially moved toward filing charges, only to back down when the evidence suggested that the damage had been caused by problems with the renovation itself.

Trump has had political success in claiming whatever he needs to in public, whether it be of a stolen election or immigrants eating cats and dogs. There are no, or very little, evidentiary standards on Truth Social or Fox News, and the court of public opinion often rules in his favour.

Courts of law work differently. Prosecutors need evidence. Presidents need legal authority. Eventually, assertion runs into requirements that cannot be wished away, as Fox News found out when it was forced to reach a $US787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after repeating Trump’s allies’ claims about election fraud.

There is a difference between enormous power and unlimited power.

The vexing thing about the ballroom is that Trump is not necessarily wrong about the underlying problem. The White House is far too small for many of the purposes it has acquired. World leaders should probably not be greeted in a tent on the lawn, and the people making globally consequential decisions could reasonably expect working spaces larger than the average cubicle.

My first visit to the White House, in 2012, involved 200 high school students crammed into the East Room to meet Barack Obama. Four of us had been chosen from each state. When Obama came down the line to greet us, he said, “I’m Barack Obama,” and I apparently lost my mind and replied, “I know. I’m in your house.”

I was wrong, of course.

It was no more Obama’s house then than it is Trump’s house now. That is the point Trump keeps running into, whether he is dealing with a ballroom, a court or the Constitution itself. The presidency gives him extraordinary power over the place. It does not make the place his.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.

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