Erin Scavino inadvertently came up with the perfect phrase to describe what the U.S. president and his enablers are doing to our nation’s capital. Between the destruction of the East Wing and the Rose Garden (and apparently the imminent razing of the Kennedy Center), tearing up the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, that hideous “ballroom”, the even more hideous proposed King Kong Arch, down to the idiotic tendency to cover every available surface of the Oval Office with tacky gold leaf — the list goes on and on.
Yes, it is all aesthetically terrifying, but it also clearly serves a purpose: Distracting Americans with the sheer ugliness of these monstrosities gives the administration cover to do the really terrifying stuff, like removing anyone from the U.S. Military command who might have moral authority and a backbone, delegitimizing the voting process by attacking mail-in ballots, attacking independent centers of thought like Universities, and establishing an armed paramilitary presence in cities that didn’t vote for the president.
Those aesthetically terrifying projects in Washington D.C., to use Erin Scavino’s apt phrase, are there for a purpose: To distract everyone from the truly terrifying projects — the ones aimed not at destroying our nation’s capital, but at our nation’s ability to conduct an orderly democratic transition of power.