Commentary: Big Tent Ideas
The White House (Screen Capture/PBS)
James P. Pinkerton
Democrats have gone full Trump Derangement Syndrome on the 47th president’s plan to build that great, big, beautiful ballroom at the White House. The project will, for sure, add more sheen to Donald Trump’s golden age. And here’s a flash report: There’s going to be a silver lining.
Yet in the meantime, the flagship of liberalism, The New York Times, has run dozens of stories, mostly sniping at the project. Sample headline: “Stephen Colbert Tears Into the White House Demolition.”
Seeking to smear it, too, are Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and also Ronald Reagan’s ungrateful but attention-hungry daughter, Patti Davis.
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Indeed, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the ballroom will be a 2028 campaign issue, as the next Democratic presidential candidate is urged—make that ordered—to pledge to tear it down. (One imagines that the same rip-it-to-shreds impulse will apply to the new White House patio.)
In addition, the usual bureaucratic suspects have piled on: the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Capital Planning Commission, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office. Oh, and the American Institute of Architects. Keeping with that theme, somebody has already filed a lawsuit.
We might step back and ask: Where were all these preservationists when the issue was preserving the bodily dignity of boys and girls? Not mutilating and sterilizing them?
But as promised, there’s a silver lining here: Trump has demonstrated the power of Just Do It. As 47 recalled, when he asked about the legal clearance process for construction, he was told, “Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.”
Hold that thought! Indeed, spread that thought!!
Imagine if the words, “You can do anything you want” were to become precedent for other kinds of construction. As we all know, in much of the country, building has been delayed, even paralyzed, by NIMBY proceduralism. The reductio ad absurdum being California’s “high speed rail to nowhere,” in which the liberal vision of mass transit choked on the Naderite vision of endless nattering. That’s how the Golden State turned a hundred billion dollars into dross.
So yes, we need permitting reform—and in his own inimitable way, Trump has shown the way. Maybe we don’t need no stinking permits. Of course, we do need familiar commonsense zoning, but not the green DEI regime the Biden administration demanded.
And what if Trump’s just-do-it ethos were to spread beyond permitting for construction? As this author has argued here at The Daily Caller, there’s no reason why this idea of deregulation couldn’t spread to, say, healthcare. As in, allow sectors or states to make themselves enterprise zones. Tests of “laboratories of democracy,” let’s see what innovators and entrepreneurs can do, unencumbered by rules designed for some earlier era (rules that probably weren’t a good idea then, either).
And now, in this golden age, we have a chance to cut through the obfuscatory clutter. Thanks to you, we could not only be shinier, but healthier.
James P. Pinkerton served in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is the author of The Secret of Directional Investing: Making Money Amidst the Red-Blue Rumble.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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