The Ballroom Beneath the Rubble

Trump sanctions Russia, sues himself, and bulldozes the East Wing to build his own Winter Palace, all before my pain meds wore off.

Good morning! The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, came to Washington hoping to keep Ukraine on life support and left looking like a man who’d just tried to reason with a blender. The media, ever eager to grade Trump on a curve that starts somewhere below sea level, declared the meeting a success because no one was physically assaulted. Meanwhile, the “deal” that emerged, sanctions on Russian oil majors, already looks like one of those midnight executive impulses Trump will disown before the ink dries. A deeper look at this meeting will be posted tomorrow morning.

The new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest oil giants, briefly jolted global markets and caused India to panic-cancel imports. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sounded almost credible announcing them, insisting the U.S. was targeting the Kremlin’s “war machine.” For a moment, it felt like policy had wandered into the White House by mistake. Then Trump, in his signature whiplash style, cancelled his planned Budapest summit with Putin because “it didn’t feel right,” assuring reporters they’d meet “in the future”, the diplomatic equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Moscow, unfazed, called the sanctions “an act of war” and promptly resumed bombing Kyiv.

While the world recalibrated to Trump’s latest about-face, the president was also exploring new ways to monetize his victimhood. Asked about reports that he’s seeking $230 million from his own Justice Department as compensation for the indignity of being investigated, Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “It could be,” before adding that he’d “give it to charity or something.” This, of course, from the man whose “charity” was dissolved for fraud. The self-settlement grift is almost poetic: he’s suing the state he runs, using the lawyers he appointed, to collect damages for crimes he was never convicted of. If Kafka had written real estate contracts, this would be the result.

And just as the ink dries on one absurdity, another lawsuit creeps in from the wings. Michael Wolff, the journalist who once spent hours interviewing Jeffrey Epstein and chronicling Trump’s meltdown from the inside, has now sued Melania Trump in New York’s Supreme Court. The filing alleges defamation and breach of contract over efforts to muzzle Wolff’s reporting on the administration’s suppression of the Epstein files. It’s a grimly fitting subplot: the First Lady of silence entangled in a fight over who gets to tell the story of corruption everyone already suspects. Trumpworld, true to form, now sues itself in circles while the rest of the country holds the bag.

Then came the real demolition, literally. On Wednesday, Americans woke up to find that the White House East Wing was being torn down, not renovated, not refurbished, but ripped apart to make room for a Trump ballroom. The same East Wing Eleanor Roosevelt built to professionalize the First Lady’s office now lies in heaps of dust and marble. Workers began the tear-down days ago, but the administration only confirmed it after aerial photos leaked. Trump brushed it off: “In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure.” Properly! As though the White House were a strip mall in Paramus.

The demolition contradicts his earlier promise that “nothing historic will be touched.” Senator Angus King called it “a betrayal of his obligation to safeguard our history and heritage,” while the National Trust for Historic Preservation begged for a halt until federal review. Too late, the bulldozers already finished half the job. Oversight, such as it is, falls to the National Capital Planning Commission, whose chair just happens to be Will Scharf, also Trump’s White House staff secretary. Scharf insists he can evaluate the project “objectively.” One can almost hear the laughter from the rubble.

The project’s cost has already ballooned to $300 million, up from $200 million in July. Trump insists he’s paying “alongside private donors,” yet no one can name a single donor, much less explain why a ballroom needs to be the size of a regional airport terminal. The White House model he showed reporters, a miniature Versailles with golden trim, sits on his Oval Office table like a funeral urn for democracy.

Even the renderings released to the press drew ridicule. MeidasTouch noted that the proposed ballroom bears a striking resemblance to Russia’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the baroque home of tsars past, now resurrected in Washington by the man who never met a despot he didn’t envy. Ornate columns, gold leaf, and imperial chandeliers straight out of Catherine the Great’s Pinterest board. Trump, with his usual flair for hyperbole, promised a spectacle “the likes of which has never been seen before”, unless, of course, you’ve ever been to Russia.

As if to gild the absurdity, the administration says the NCPC will now review the ballroom plans that justified the demolition that already happened. It’s a perfect metaphor for this era: the paperwork always arrives after the wrecking ball.

And through it all, Trump insists it’s progress. Maybe it is, if your definition of progress involves replacing history with chandeliers. In a sense, he’s finally fulfilling his campaign promise to “drain the swamp.” Unfortunately, he’s doing it with a backhoe.

The economic backdrop keeps creaking. The shadow-banking system is beginning to buckle under its own speculative weight, a trillion-dollar web of private credit funds, opaque derivatives, and off-balance-sheet lending that now props up much of the real economy. When traditional banks pulled back after the last crash, these shadow financiers rushed in, unregulated and over-leveraged. Now, with Trump’s tariffs squeezing margins and interest-rate chaos spreading through global markets, those private credit empires are wobbling. Analysts warn that defaults are quietly accelerating in sectors no regulator is watching. The president, naturally, insists “everything’s fantastic,” which is what every man says when his foundation is crumbling. I’ll have more on this in an upcoming essay.

For readers trying to trace how we got here, from the Moscow money that rescued Trump’s bankrupt empire to the gilded ballroom now rising from the ashes, two books are worth your time. Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People lays bare how the KGB repurposed oligarch wealth to infiltrate Western power circles. Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin connects the dots to the former president’s own lifeline of Russian cash, mapping the long, greasy trail from post-Soviet laundromats to Mar-a-Lago. Read them side by side and you’ll see that today’s “sanctions” are less policy than performance, the apprentice pretending to fire his boss.

So here we are: a president suing himself, a First Lady sued by his biographer, and a White House literally collapsing under the weight of his ego. The East Wing is gone, the DOJ is on the hook, and the nation is left wondering whether the ballroom will come with a cover charge, or if admission, like everything else in Trump’s America, will simply be deducted from our taxes.

So if today’s roundup feels a little more rambling than usual, blame the painkillers, and Marz, who has decided that dental misery is no excuse not to demand a full trail romp. The world may be on fire, the White House may be rubble, and the economy may be one interest rate away from collapse, but apparently the dog still believes in fetch. And really, maybe he’s right.