Subject: Fool me again
Which fool exempted the White House, the nation’s most iconic building, from any strict review process? I guess the kind of fool who assumed an American president would take the same kind of care President Truman did when he ran his taxpayer-funded 1948 renovation through a six-person bipartisan commission and consulted the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Commission of Fine Arts. The 1966 act clearly never anticipated that a president would act as unilaterally as Trump and risk the conflict of interest involved in tapping unscrutinized private donors to build a casino-sized golden temple to the religion of Big. ——Tina Brown