DISORDER(S): East Wings come and East Wings go!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2025

But human disorder remains: East Wings come and East Wings go but the time for the ballroom was now.

On this campus, we don't even necessarily disagree with this assessment, as offered by Ross Douthat, New York Times headline included:

Why Trump’s East Wing Demolition Needed to Happen

[...]

The case for Trump’s ballroom is connected to these failures. First, it is simply good to build a White House ballroom; the presidency has needed one for a long time, and it’s absurd that the leader of a superpower has to host state dinners inside temporary tents.

Have we the people been needing a ballroom? Everything is possible! 

Meanwhile, at the partially reinvented Washington Post, the editors may have been working to keep owner Jeff Bezos out of the commander's sites. Headline included, this was the paper's official editorial about the way the East Wing disappeared:

In defense of the White House ballroom

The teardown of the White House’s East Wing this week is a Rorschach test. Many see the rubble as a metaphor for President Donald Trump’s reckless disregard of norms and the rule of law, a reflection of his willingness to bulldoze history and a temple to a second Gilded Age, paid for by corporate donors. Others see what they love about Trump: A lifelong builder boldly pursuing a grand vision, a change agent unafraid to decisively take on the status quo and a developer slashing through red tape that would stymie any normal politician.

[...]

Trump joins a long list of presidents who have left their imprint on the White House. Theodore Roosevelt replaced greenhouses to construct the West Wing. William Howard Taft constructed the first Oval Office in 1909. Richard M. Nixon converted a swimming pool into the press briefing room in 1970. The modern East Wing wasn’t even built until World War II to cover up an underground bunker. Harry S. Truman gutted the White House interior and added the balcony that bears his name. Purists decried it. Now it’s a hallmark.

The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.

Strong leader President Trump will be decisively building a ballroom in what was once the East Wing's back yard. As if in thrall to Larry the Cable Guy, he was willing to "Git-R-Done."

The editors hailed his decisive action while perhaps ignoring the metaphorical rubble of which the demolition may form the latest part. They ignored the strange behaviors which preceded this unusual action—and, within the mainstream guild, it's still against the law to mention the "personality disorder" which may e tangled up in this array of peculiar parts.

To wit:

Before he tore the East Wing down, the president posted a video which pictured himself dropping excrement on the heads of us the people. The editorial board, whoever they are, offered no assessment of that.

Before that, he'd offered a Truth Social post which called the Democratic Party "the party of Satan." Also, he'd offered a Truth Social video which showed Barack Obama, a former president, being handcuffed and frog-marched away.

He had hailed the wonders of the magic beds—and then too, there has been all the apparent disorder which flowed from the apparent nut-balls he has decided to assemble around him:

The peculiar claim by his DNI that President Obama had been guilty of a "treasonous conspiracy," presumably against the United States. 

The two (2) occasions on which his Secretary of Homeland Security went on TV and told the story, in weird detail, of the bad hombre who was so bad that he—"a cannibal," as it turned out—tried to eat his own arm to effectuate an escape from the handcuffs which were enabling his deportation.

What's taking place inside the head of a person willing to tell that story—a person who is willing to tell that story two times?

Then too, there were and are the president's ongoing demands to keep locking his opponents up. The editors blew past these surrounding behaviors as they praised the sitting president for tearing the East Wing down.

Various types of mental disorder may seem to inhabit this White House. As the editorial board praised the president's decisive action, they ignored the possibility that his remarkably odd behaviors, not excluding the demolition, may stem from a "personality disorder" (clinical term) which he may have inherited from his "high-functioning sociopath" father when he was still in the womb.

Did some such genetic event take place? Could it bring on a type of (serious, diagnosable) "personality disorder?" 

Journalists have agreed not to wonder or ask. But if the leading authority can be believed, medical science has even demonstrated this:

Antisocial personality disorder

[...] 

In the specific genes that may be involved, one gene that has shown particular promise in its correlation with ASPD is the gene that encodes for monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), an enzyme that breaks down monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine. Various studies examining the gene's relationship to behavior have suggested that variants of the gene resulting in less MAO-A being produced (such as the 2R and 3R alleles of the promoter region) have associations with aggressive behavior in men.

Or not! For more on the apparent state of the science, click here for last Friday's report. But the press corps has decided that medical science of this sort must be disappeared in cases like this. And so, after the president made the East Wing disappear, the editorial board did the same thing with respect to the developing state of current medical science.

(Meanwhile, who sits on this Bezos-era editorial board? We've searched on several occasions now, but we can't seem to find out.)

As always, unintentional humor existed as the Usefuls at the Fox News Channel kept selling the company line. On Saturday's Fox & Friends Weekend, there sat Kayleigh McEnany, the Harvard Law School grad, telling Charlie Hurt how stupid this whole brouhaha was:

HURT (10/25/25): And of course, the White House has been under lots and lots of renovations over the years—most famously, or most importantly, most significantly, Harry Truman completely gutted the White House during his presidency.

MCENANY: Yeah, I mean, look at these images [on the studio wall]. They're striking. This is called, as Karoline [Leavitt] said, "demolition." And you do demolition in order to rebuild bigger, greater and better. And who better to do that than the guy who built the New York City skyline, President Donald J. Trump?

Except within the talking points of this "cable news" channel, s of this corporate child, President Trump didn't actually "build the New York City skyline." (Neither did anyone else.) As to what President Truman did, here was historian Tim Naftali, helping Anderson Cooper's viewers know what these messengers left out:

COOPER (10/23/25): Tim, is this the same as past presidents who have, you know, renovated? Harry Truman, you know, as we pointed out and David [Axelrod] reiterated, you know, gutted from the inside.

NAFTALI: Well, David is right that the White House has evolved...So indeed, Harry Truman did have to—the entire Truman family had to move out of the White House. But why?

Because the place was no longer structurally sound. The Corps of Engineers said it was going to fall down. That's why he left. And how did they rebuild it? They rebuilt it with guidance from a bipartisan commission with members chosen by the Congress of the United States and the President, and that commission helped design the new White House. 

So the idea that was done unilaterally by Truman is actually made up.

So it went as Naftali challenged the story McEnany and Hurt "made up." In fairness, they were working from material their corporate owners had placed on the wall behind them—misleading material the owners had taken straight from the Trump Administration itself.

Is some sort of "personality disorder" involved in this president's unusual behaviors? Whatever the answer may be, intellectual disorder is never far from the scene whenever we humans split ourselves into tribes and construct our dueling narratives.

We've suggested that you pity the child who may have been born with variants of a gene resulting in less MAO-A being produced. That said, we've also tried to record the erratic behaviors which may be resulting from that possible genetic disorder.

Could those erratic behaviors possibly be producing real danger? Has serious harm to the nation's functioning already been done? At the Fox News Channel, viewers will routinely be exposed to selective information—and over here, in Blue America, the disorders, of various types, may sometimes seem to be general too.

Is there any way to emerge from our nation's current tribal mess? The Washington Post, like the Fox News Channel, basically seemed to be reciting the Trump Admin's points.

But what are our own Blue American cadres saying? This might be the perfect week to consider the way those od ud in Blue America have also managed to fail.

Tomorrow: When Blue American cadres react