The White House Treaty Room has a deep history. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley used it as their Cabinet Room—McKinley signed the peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War at its cabinet table in 1898. Who knows what he would have made of a Diet Coke button.

John F. Kennedy sat at the same table in 1963 and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a document that, however imperfect, acknowledged that nuclear war between two superpowers would be catastrophic for everyone involved.

President George W. Bush used the room in October 2001 to start the “Enduring Freedom” war in Afghanistan after 9/11. And Joe Biden went there in April 2021 to announce the end of the 20-year conflict in the country.

But Donald Trump? He wants to tear it apart to create a knock-off Super 8 hotel guest room with its own bathroom. Of course he does.

He gold-plates the East Room. He gilds the Oval Office. He bulldozes the East Wing to build a $400 million ballroom. The “builder-in-chief,” as Trump’s spokesperson calls him, has “an extraordinary eye for detail and design,” after all.

That’s the same eye that conceived the bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal. It won’t be long until he turns the East Room, where seven presidents have lain in repose, into a full-fledged casino, with Pete Hegseth and Markwayne Mullin as blackjack dealers, and Kristi Noem as a cocktail waitress.

Because if you’ve only maintained a........

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