Disfigurement, &c.

On RFK Jr., America, and vaccines; a new White House (physically); Stalin and Putin in Russia; and more

The White House, as it is scheduled to be (Photo courtesy of the White House)

Some people speak of “the Before Times,” referring to American politics prior to 2016. I sometimes speak of “the After Times.” What can be restored, that ought to be restored, in the period post-Trump, and post-Trumpism?

How about PEPFAR, the anti-AIDS program? How about Radio Free Asia and other such U.S. broadcasting services? How about the Kremlin-watching units in the Justice Department?

This brings me to some recent news: “Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts.” That is a headline in the New York Times, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary. The article is here.

I think of what Donald Trump said in the 2024 campaign—specifically, at an October rally held in Madison Square Garden: “Robert F. Kennedy cares more about human beings and health and the environment than anybody, and I’m gonna let him go wild on health, I’m gonna let him go wild on the food, I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines.”

According to experts I am inclined to trust, the cancellation of this vaccine research is a terrible blow to the United States and to human progress. But it’s kind of what we voted for, true?

You may have heard about the transformation—the physical transformation—of the White House:

This seems to me something that is irreversible—something that will live on in the After Times. Trump has paved over the Rose Garden. The Rose Garden can be restored, can’t it? He has done up the Oval Office in Vegas style. The office can be de-Vegas-ized, right?

But this expansion, or extension, of the White House seems ... permanent.

Many people will regard it as a final, lasting middle finger to America. Many other people will revel in it. Some in the second group will agree with the first.

My friend Mona Charen said the following, in a superb, bracing column:

This presidency is a repudiation of the republican principles of our founding. Trump is a walking wrecking ball of law, tradition, civility, manners, and morals. Many visitors to the nation’s capital won’t know or understand much of that damage. But starting now with the paving of the Rose Garden, and coming soon with the construction of a garish ballroom, they will see a physical representation of a low and shameful time. The once graceful executive mansion will be transformed into something tasteless and embarrassing. It will be both awful and fitting.

I acknowledge that I am a conservative. There is something instinctive in me that reacts against change, or balks at it. When they installed I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, in 1989, I was among those who were aghast. It seemed to me an imposition. Now the pyramid is part of the furniture, so to speak.

And I realize that many Parisians were aghast when the Eiffel Tower was erected a hundred years before Pei’s pyramid.

Am I overreacting to this extension, the Trump-stension, of the White House? Maybe. Maybe not. But I have a particular feeling about the White House.

Let me quote from a column of mine published in June:

I have always loved the White House. This stems from my love of America in general: its founding, its principles, its ideals, its history—the adventure we are on. I have always thought that the White House is a perfect republican edifice. Just right for our presidential mansion. It is not like Versailles. But it is not overly modest, either. It fits our American republic like a glove.

(By the way, I would not want Versailles any other way. Vive Versailles. But long live the White House, too.)

My grandmother, 40 years ago, gave me a two-volume history of the White House: The President’s House, by William Seale. It is the president’s house, true—but it is also our house.

In 2016, I used the word “disfigurement”—and “disfigure” and so on. Let me quote a piece I wrote in June of that year, explaining why I had left my longtime party, the GOP: “By nominating [Trump], the Republican party has disfigured itself, morally.” Is the White House now to be disfigured, physically?

To say it again, my instinctive conservatism may be in overdrive, unreasonably. I recognize that things “evolve,” including buildings. We will see.

One more word on this subject: Partisanship, or tribalism, is in the saddle. Red is red, blue is blue, and never the twain shall meet. People who support Trump in general will likely support these physical changes to the White House—or at least defend them. People who oppose Trump in general will oppose the changes.

What if Obama, Clinton (either one), Biden, or Harris were effecting these changes? What would Republicans say then? (I bet they’d act like conservatives.) What would Democrats say?

***

I have another question for you: What is Left, what is Right? This has been a theme of mine in recent times. Just last week, I sounded that theme, in a column. Here is a paragraph:

What is Putin, by the way? Is he left-wing or right-wing? He is a former KGB colonel who has re-Sovietized Russia. Yet he is admired by people on the nationalist-populist right throughout the world.

Meduza is a highly valuable organization, a Russian news service (in exile, of course). On Tuesday, Meduza issued a tweet:

Mourners came to remember the Great Terror’s victims, but the Kremlin’s right-wing proxy thugs were waiting with provocative signs and loud patriotic music to drown out the reading of the names.

(Let me say: I wish “patriotic” were in quotation marks.)

Meduza was circulating an article, which begins,

Pro-government extremists disrupted a memorial service for Stalin-era repression victims at the Sandarmokh cemetery in Karelia, where thousands were executed during the Soviet Union’s Great Terror in the late 1930s.

The article goes on to say that “members of the ultra-right ‘Russian Community’” and other such groups “splashed water at mourners” and “played loud patriotic music to drown out the traditional reading of victims’ names.” Meanwhile, “state television crews filmed the disruption” and police “stood by.”

Of course.

So, these enthusiasts for Stalin, and Putin: “right-wing”?

Yuri Dmitriev was a researcher at Sandarmokh, and he was associated with Memorial, the organization founded by Andrei Sakharov and his friends. Memorial is now banned, obviously, along with civil society at large. And Dmitriev is a political prisoner.

I wrote about him in 2017, here.

I’m always saying this, but I’ll say it again: Remember the “other Russia”—the Russia that is not Putin and Putinists.

***

Today, I am writing you from Salzburg, where I’m doing my annual work at the festival. (More on that in articles to come.) But I would like to show you a photo from New York. I had never noticed this park before:

Bella Abzug, as you know, was a Democratic politician in New York, way to the left. She was a fierce rival of Ed Koch, a Democrat who called himself “a liberal with sanity.” (Other Democrats resented that description, as you can imagine.) Bella was a prickly personality, to put it mildly. I imagine that Mr. Abzug (Martin) had to be careful.

Koch told a story—well, a great many, but I’m thinking of one concerning the Abzugs. I believe he told it to me in an interview we filmed, but, in any case, I heard it from him, at some point.

One day, he and Martin Abzug ran into each other in an elevator. They had a pleasant conversation. As they were parting, Abzug said to Koch, “Please don’t tell Bella we saw each other.”

Koch got such a kick out of that, in the recounting.

Thank you for joining me today, my friends. If you can subscribe to this lil’ publication, great. Regardless, I’ll see you later, maybe with a Salzburg story or two. I already have some saved up.