Trump demonstrates what ‘dictator’ means, by being one.
Trump demonstrates what ‘dictator’ means, by being one.
22 October 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Can the President demolish or remodel the White House?
Technically, no.
The White House doesn’t belong to the President.
It’s federal property managed, by the National Park Service.
And maintained by taxpayer money.
So, while the President can pick the furniture, colors or decorations, any major changes like tearing down walls or rebuilding, require congresssional approval and federal funding, according to the White House Historic Association and the National Park Service.
The last time that happened was during Harry Truman’s Presidency, when the building was literally falling apart. Congress approved a full reconstruction in the late 1940s.
But there’s [now] the twist.
Under President Trump, a $200 to $250 million ballroom addition to the East Wing is underway and 90,000-square-foot expansion.
The Administration says the work can proceed because it’s privately funded [though private funding is illegal because it “requires congressional approval and federal funding”?].
The head of the National Capital Planning Commission appointed by Trump has said the demolition and side prep don’t need a Commission approval since the jurisdiction covers only vertical construction.
But critics argue that still violates federal preservation rules, since the White House is a National Historic Landmark.
Federal law requires that major renovations follow preservation standards set by the National Historic Preservation Act, and oversight by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
So, even if it’s privately funded, it raises the question:
Can any President really make changes to the people’s house?
Does a sitting President have that kind of power?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Whereas Biden said “I am running the world,” Trump said “I run the country and the world.”
If he runs the country, he is a dictator.
If he runs the world, he is the first-ever global dictator.
This problem is much bigger than just whether Trump is breaking the law regarding the Whte House, because a dictator has much more power than just that. Furthermore, if the law itself has been written by agents of billionaires, instead of by agents of the public, then the public are totally trapped.
George W. Bush said “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us” — he threateningly said to any Government that would NOT subordinate themselves to “stand squarely with the United States in the defense of ‘freedom’,” that any such nation is an American target, America’s enemy — to be sanctioned-to-death, or even invaded (paid-for by the public via taxes — NOT by billionaires who expect to benefit by such aggressions).
Obama said “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” All other nations are “dispensable.” He emphasized that Russia, China, Brazil, and India, are in that category, “dispensable,” and that their “rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.” He instructed the U.S. military “to respond to this,” and that “America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that leadership.” Not the U.N. and its international laws and enforcement mechanisms, such as FDR had carefully planned for the post-WW2 world, but which Truman immediately negated with his plan that instead the U.S. Government must take over the entire world. All ‘historians’ miss this drastic reversal of FDR, by Truman, but Truman’s world is the world that we are living in — not FDR’s world, which would have functionining, enforced international laws, instead of America’s “rules-based international order,” enforced by the U.S.military.
Trump comes from that line, the post-WW2 line, of Imperial American Presidents, and all of them have been so very unAmerican that in not a single instance, among the more than a hundred U.S. foreign invasions after WW2 (most of which occurred after the Soviet Union ended in 1991), did any of these invasions EVER comply with the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that ONLY by means of a Declaration of War by the U.S. Congress is a President allowed to invade a foreign country. Never until Truman became President, was that crucial Constitutional provision violated; but always after FDR’s Presidency, it has been consistently violated. This is how fundamental the change in our country is — this change that ‘historians’ don’t even notice.
Dictator Trump did not come from nowhere; he is just another in what tragically is a long and continuous line of treasonous U.S. Presidents. He even believes that he is the global Emperor. He thereby constantly spits upon the graves of the great men who collectively wrote our Constitution and all of its Amendments, our nation’s actual Founders, the writers of our founding document. It’s treason that these Presidents have done. And it exposes the lie that the Presidential oath-of-office has been ever since Truman became President: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” If violating that oath-of-office — violating the U.S. Constitution — is not treason, then what IS? It certainly is alien to America, and far more so than any “illegal alien” is.
However, the situation in this case is even worse than that, because that instagram was actually false: President Trump really does have the legal authority to treat the U.S. White House as being subject to private money and to his personal will to deface it as he wishes. The public owns the White House, but the White House can be treated by ts occupant in any way that he wants.
The instagram is correct that “Federal law requires that major renovations follow preservation standards set by the National Historic Preservation Act.” However, that law’s Section 107 (16 U.S.C. 470g) says “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to be applicable to the White House and its grounds.”
This is how billionaires, such as Trump and his megadonors who made him the President, are safe from the law: their agents WROTE the laws; and, so, there is a loophole in the laws that their agents wrote, to allow anything that they might want to do. This is actually a dictatorship by wealth, not merely by one man. This President merely represents them, just as his predecessors going back to 1945 have been doing.
The entire post-WW2 U.S. Government operates this way — not as a democracy but as an aristocracy (rule by the super-rich). It is a collective dictatorship, like Warren Buffett said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
These billionaires (the ones that were the ‘public’ official’s megadonors) aim at a world in which they collectively control the entire world, and they are hiring the people to make it happen. Their top goal is global hegemony: to spread the U.S. empire — THEIR empire — collectively to control the entire world. They believe that what benefits themselves benefits the entire society, and so the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth must simply be ignored, and, “We’re living through what might be the final decade where human problem-solving operates under scarcity constraints.” The poor, in other words, should just be ignored — everybdy will be better off because of what these billionaires do. (But what they have done has given us this dictatorship. Some of them call their philosophy “Technocracy”; they are “Technocrats.” They stand atop it. They ask us to trust them.)
In a very real sense, Trump was right when he said “I run the country and the world.” But changing one dictator by another doesn’t end the dictatorship. The problem is much bigger than just Trump.
If this might sound spooky, that’s not because I wrote it, but because all of it is true. (And that is the reason why I always provide links that go straight down to my basic sources, so that everythng in what I write can be checked-out by the reader, on one’s own. I am a total anti-authoritarian. I question everything. I don’t trust what anyone says.)
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
Certainly Truman was US dictator model. He was even installed in a dictatorial, Banana Republic manner, via behind the scenes coup at democrat convention in July 1944. FDRs VP had been popular Henry Wallace but Wallace wasn't a mass murderer. Truman was a virtual unknown though Elites must've known he was their ideal--a mass murderer who'd have no trouble dropping 2 atom bombs on civilians. With FDR in failing health, elites at the convention got Wallace out and Truman in. Truman later made Wallace Sec. of Commerce but fired him in 1946 for merely suggesting detente with USSR. A US ally, USSR had saved the world from Hitler, had survived being occupied and starved by Hitler for over a year, had lost 25 million of its citizens (including a baby who would've been Putin's older brother). But Truman's #1 job was to enslave Americans to the global war racket in perpetuity. For that he needed a Big Bad Enemy so he chose USSR. When USSR ended in 1991, "Russia" became the permanent enemy. But to Truman and elites, the real #1 enemy was US taxpayers. Enslaving us as Pax Americana, etc., continues to guarantee that we're never allowed to consider our own needs first.
Oddly, no matter which political party is in power, we are witnessing an increasing move toward lawlessness and authoritarianism. Who's to stop them, after all? Clearly, we citizens have zero say in how our government operates, especially once they cracked the code on fraudulent elections.