It’s like the East Wing demolition all over again…
“You announced you wanted to build a new and spectacular entertainment complex at the Kennedy Center. Right. Do you plan on tearing it down? And how much will all of the renovations cost?” a reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office.”
“Probably around 200 million dollars,” Trump replied. “
And, you know, it’s funny in real estate and building. I’ve done so much of it. I’ve done so well with it. Uh. You want to sit with something for a little while before you decide on what you want to do. And, you know, we sat with it. We ran it.”
“The place is in really bad shape.
It’s run down. It’s dilapidated. It’s kind of dangerous. People—Things fall out, uh, fall out of ceilings. You’ve seen it,” he rambled on. “And we had some big events there. We had a lot of great events here over the last year.”
In reality, the Kennedy Center has had trouble booking artists after Trump took over and filled the board with MAGA supporters.
The institution has been plagued by prominent musicians and performers canceling their dates in protest. These new renovations are at least partially designed to shut the center down to give Trump a temporary reprieve from the embarrassing headlines.
“But you can’t do any work because people are coming in and out,” Trump continued.
“And you have the workman. We have a marble man over there the other day, he said, uh, ‘You know, every time I put down a piece of marble, people are stepping on the marble.'”
“They don’t even have time to dry,” Trump went on. “
And you can’t do the same quality job if you… If you close it. And, you know, we’re fully financed.”
It’s unclear where the supposed financing is coming from.
It’s possible that Trump plans on taking massive corrupt donations from corporations and billionaires like he’s doing to fund his East Wing ballroom. If so, it would be another blatant example of his White House engaging in pay-to-play bribery. The alternative would be for Trump to somehow coerce Congress into paying for the renovations, which means that the American taxpayer would get stuck footing the bill.
“And so we’re going to close it, and we’re going to make it unbelievable,” Trump continued.
“Far better than it ever was. And we’ll be able to do it properly. I was thinking maybe there’s a way of doing it simultaneously but there really isn’t. And we’re going to have something that, when it opens, it’s going to be brand new, beautiful.”
“I’m not ripping it down.
I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure. We’re using some of the marble and some of the marble comes down,” Trump said, seemingly contradicting himself in the same breath. If he only intends on reusing the steel, marble, and underlying structure, that could still mean he intends on demolishing large sections of the building.
“But when it’s open, it’ll be brand new and really beautiful.
It’ll be at the highest level,” he said. “We can do a much better job, probably, in a way, a faster job. You know, because when you do it piecemeal, for instance, they have a play tonight, and you can’t do anything. You have to pull out everything.”
“And you can’t have stanchions all over the place if people are walking in to see a play,” Trump continued. “
So we’ll be closing it sometime around July 4th. It’s like we’ll close it on July 4th in order to do something great for America. And then we’re going to build it. We have great contractors. We’re going to build it, and we’ll do it right. We’re using the highest-grade marbles, the highest-grade everything. It’ll be brand new.”
The suggestion that it will be “brand new” flies directly in the face of his claim that they are not “ripping it down.
” As always, this president’s promises are worth less than a Trump University diploma.
Let’s be clear about what this is.
This is a president in full-blown cognitive decline desperately reaching for some kind of legacy as his domestic agenda ravages the American people. He wants to be remembered as some great builder but in reality he’ll be remembered as a pedophile who destroyed our nation’s global standing.
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