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| Military honor guard stand outside the main building of the Ak Saray, or the “White Palace,” in Ankara, Turkey, in 2014. (Burhan Ozbilici/AP) |
To many onlookers, the symbolism felt overwhelming. The rapid demolition of the East Wing of the White House last week to make way for a planned giant ballroom stunned the press corps, politicians and conservationists, who had taken to heart President Donald Trump’s earlier insistence that his desired construction would not interfere with the original structure. But less than a year into a second term shaped by his ability to break things, Trump had taken a jackhammer to the literal edifice of the U.S. presidency in a desire to build something more concretely in his own image. As The Washington Post detailed, the plans for the project envision a large neoclassical structure rising from where the East Wing once stood, replete with a gold-filigreed audience hall capable of accommodating 1,000 attendees, as well as new offices and suites for esteemed White House guests. The building’s footprint would be almost double that of the 55,000-square-foot main section of the White House itself, to which it would be connected by an eye-catching glass bridge. Renovations of public offices and official residences are par for the course in countries everywhere, and the White House has gone through myriad refurbishments and expansions in its more than 22 decades-long history. Trump officials say the ensuing controversy about the East Wing teardown is “manufactured outrage.” Trump has already embarked on a striking overhaul of the White House, shifting its aesthetic to be more in line with the gaudy, gilded displays of his private properties. The president’s critics point to the lack of consultation about the move, the disregard for historical conservation, the opacity in the process and the obvious ethical questions that surround the corporate donations funding the construction. Through it all, they see the figure of Trump. “It is the ‘People’s House.’ It doesn’t belong to him,” Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) told my colleagues, calling on Republicans in charge of Congress to speak up. “If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had started taking a backhoe to the White House, they would have had a heart attack.” |
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Demolition continues on the East Wing of the White House on Thursday. MUST CREDIT: Matt McClain/The Washington Post (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) |
Eleven years ago, one of Trump’s kindred spirits unveiled a far more dramatic update to his nation’s capital. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already held power as prime minister for more than decade, and wanted to cement his political legacy with a new presidential palace in Ankara that reflected his rule. The Cankaya Mansion in downtown Ankara had been the abode of every Turkish president since the founding of the republic in 1923, but was no longer fit for purpose — at least, in Erdogan’s mind. So a vast complex was erected on a forested hilltop in the city’s outskirts. The Ak Saray, or “White Palace,” dwarfs the White House in scale, with 50 times the floor space of latter. The palace was billed as an abode with 1,100 rooms, both ornate and ultramodern, an imposing pile of giant marble columns, high-tech underground facilities and a mosque that could accommodate thousands of worshipers. Its architectural style was a mishmash, borrowing on themes from Turkey’s Ottoman past but also, as one critic saw it, the brutal gestures of early 20th century fascism. The construction cost of at least $615 million was double the initial estimate, and Erdogan and his allies disregarded legal attempts to stop the project’s destruction of protected land. A year prior, battles in Istanbul over the government’s plan to bulldoze a green space in the heart of the city morphed into a sprawling protest movement against Erdogan’s perceived authoritarian drift. The Turkish leader withstood the unrest, which preceded his switch from the role of prime minister to president and his strategy to revamp the country’s constitution and tighten his grip through a strong executive presidency. Erdogan’s opponents already saw the complex as the embodiment of a worrisome political order; one opposition figure, incensed by the expense, scoffed at the time that the new palace made Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II “look poor” and Russia’s Kremlin palace look “like an outhouse.” Erdogan was unmoved. “The new Turkey should assert itself with something new,” he told reporters then. “The presidential office has been arranged in a very special way, we have paid particular attention to this.” As long as there’s been human civilization, there have been leaders with vanity projects. But those projects often become symbols of the status quo. Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkey scholar and fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Trump’s gutting of the East Wing is “unnervingly similar” to Erdogan’s presidential makeover. “That marked a deliberate break with how Turkey had been governed for decades — and signaled a consolidation of power. In both cases, the connection between size and power is the key,” she told me. “By constructing something grand and imposing, Erdogan signaled the birth of a new era — one in which Turkey’s ascendance was fused with his personal brand. Personal grandeur became a vehicle for state power. It was intertwined.” Washington Post art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott weighed what Trump was trying to message through his project. “He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents,” he wrote. “And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings,” Kennicott concluded. “Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.” |
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Part of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews during construction to build a new ballroom on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) |
In the case of Turkey, the decade since the unveiling of the Ak Saray has seen Erdogan cement his rule and legacy. He has outmaneuvered political opponents either through elections where the playing field was never level or sheer repression, with arrests and detentions of prominent lawmakers and potential challengers. Trump, ever the admirer of strongmen, has heaped praise upon Erdogan multiple times. Even as the latter was locking up the mayor of Istanbul — arguably his greatest electoral threat — on charges widely seen as trumped up, the U.S. president was proffering White House invitations to Erdogan while dismantling democracy-promoting agencies at home. At a joint Oval Office appearance in late September, Trump smiled at Erdogan and suggested he “knows about rigged elections better than anybody.” Trump, who still believes he won the 2020 election that he lost, did not seem to mean it as a criticism. |
| | • Negotiators have reached a framework of a trade deal to avert additional 100 percent tariffs that Trump had threatened to impose on imports from China, setting the stage for the U.S. president’s highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday. And, ahead of the summit, GOP hawks in Congress are pushing the president to hold the line in a competition with Beijing, reports our colleague Noah Robertson. But the months-long lobbying effort has largely failed to sway the president, who has argued that the U.S. and China could solve all the world’s problems if they could just get along. • The United States is massing an unusual buildup of warships, fighter jets and surveillance aircraft off the coast of Venezuela as the Trump administration expands its military campaign against what it says are transnational criminal organizations. The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its associated warships are heading to the region, the Pentagon said Friday, a significant expansion of the U.S. presence. • Trump said he is raising tariffs on Canadian imports, citing the airing of a television ad in the United States that features President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs. • Argentina voted Sunday in nationwide legislative elections that experts said would serve as a referendum both on libertarian President Javier Milei and his experiment with radical austerity in Latin America’s third-largest economy, with initial results indicating a strong showing for Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza. The vote came as the United States finalized an up to $40 billion bailout package for Argentina. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described the assistance as being part of a new “economic Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America. |
| | Opinion Heba Aly | Foreign Policy | | |
OpinionJonathan A. Czin | Foreign Affairs | | |
OpinionPaul Starr | The New Republic | | |
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| Donald Trump in New York in 1984. (Marty Lederhandler/AP) |
TOKYO — The Japan that first caught President Donald Trump’s attention in the 1980s was a Japan of glitzy excess and big dreams, a place so flush with cash that businessmen dropped $14,000 tips at hostess bars and golf memberships cost upward of $3 million. Sales of high-end models of Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz cars soared. Land values were so high that the Imperial Palace grounds in the center of Tokyo, measuring just over 1 square mile, were worth more than all the real estate in California. In the 1980s, when the 30-something real estate developer built a golden tower in New York on Fifth Avenue bearing his name, Japanese companies snapped up prime property in the United States — including Rockefeller Center near Fifth Avenue. Japan was also a global leader in innovation: It had invented the Sony Walkman, VCRs and Nintendo games. It seemed like Japan owned the future. A renowned Harvard professor had even published a book called “Japan as Number One,” so certain did it appear that Japan would leapfrog the United States to become the world’s biggest economy. This Japan appears to be the animating principle behind the tariff regime that Trump, now on his second presidential term, is using to reshape the global economy and stop, as he said, wealthy economies from “ripping off” the United States, experts say. “First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan,” Trump told Playboy magazine in 1990. “So either way, we lose.” His solution, then and now: tariffs. But Japan today is not the go-go speculative booming Japan of Trump’s memory. Today, Japan is number four. Trump will arrive in Tokyo on Monday, his first trip of this term. He and Japan’s newly elected prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, are expected to discuss the U.S.-Japan trade agreement, under which Japan agreed to 15 percent tariffs on all its exports to the United States and promised to invest $550 billion into the country. But Trump’s trade policies are stuck in the era of competition four decades ago, analysts say. “He’s never really let go of that perception of Japan as a peer challenger … even as Japan isn’t exactly a peer competitor with the United States anymore,” said Paul Nadeau, an expert in international trade policy at Temple University’s Japan campus. “He never got past it.” – Michelle Ye Hee Lee Read on: How Trump’s perception of Japan collides with today’s economic reality |
|  (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)
By Jennifer Hassan and Leo Sands | | |
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Welcome to my geopolitics blog site. This is a Hawaii Island news site focusing on geopolitical news, analysis, information, and commentary. I will cite a variety of sources, ranging from all sides of the political spectrum.