Trump would probably have done it anyway. The sound of jackhammers pulverizing zoning laws was the music of his childhood. In a wonderfully resonant piece in The Daily Beast, veteran special correspondent Michael Daly described how Trump’s ferociously venal father, the real estate developer Fred Trump, intent on building seaside apartments, tore down Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park—which landmarkers hadn’t got to in time. Wielding an axe and grinning under his con man’s fedora, Fred instructed the invited crowd to throw bricks at the smiling face on the glass facade of the park’s Pavilion of Fun, then the symbol of Coney Island. His earthmovers rolled in over the glass shards and finished the job.

Before Trump actually builds his gilt-drenched hippodrome, he does have to submit his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, now conveniently headed by Will Sharf, one of his former attorneys. His father Fred wasn’t so smart. After his 1966 Coney Island park demolition, Fred Trump slipped up on ensuring the political fix was in to speed through his seaside apartment towers. He came up against something unexpected: a new reform-minded NYC mayor with a backbone, John Lindsay, who, as the Beast’s Michael Daly tells us, “believed that zoning should mean something.” Fred Trump never got to build those towers.

How apt—and unlikely—it would be if Trump doesn’t get his way this time. And instead of a big beautiful ballroom filled with dancing donors, his presidential legacy is marked by school tours of an Ozymandian pile of rubble that once was the East Wing of the White House. ——Tina Brown