Image from South Park season premier available on Paramount+ and other platforms.
Image from South Park season premier available on Paramount+ and other platforms.
Construction "expert" Trump in a "brilliant" attempt at a gotcha about renovation costs of the Fed's building ends up just chomping on his own foot.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Okay, go ahead and pick your jaws up off the floor, so I can get started. What is Trump wrong about this time? The Federal Reserve’s renovation project, because of course he is! He’s a six-time bankrupt former real estate magnate, so what would he know about building construction costs?
As little as you would think, it turns out. Trump made headlines today by forcing a snap visit to the construction site at the Federal Reserve’s Eccles building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. Met by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump has threatened to fire, Trump came quickly to the purpose of his visit to the Fed, the first by a president since 2006 when George W. Bush attended the swearing in of Ben Bernanke.
MAGA ducks nibbling at Chairman Powell, looking for a reason for Trump to fire him, suggested to Trump that he could use the cost overruns on the Fed’s renovation project as a pretext—you know, he’s wasting the people’s money! Fire his ass!
Trump made a show of pulling a sheaf of papers from the folds of his commodious suit and shoving them at Powell, as he claimed that the Fed cost overruns are not the $2.5 billion Powell has quoted, but $3.1 billion. Powell, looking surprised at Trump’s attempt at a “gotcha” moment, quickly scanned the papers he was handed and replied that told Trump had mistakenly lumped in the cost of another Fed renovation, to the Martin building just across C Street behind the Eccles building, which went through its own renovation beginning five years ago. The Fed is using the freshly renovated Martin building to house its offices until the renovation on its headquarters, the Eccles building, is completed.
Trump appeared upset by Chairman Powell’s easy dismissal of his “gotcha” and they moved on to complete the construction site tour. When asked by reporters if he still had plans to fire Powell, Trump brushed aside the questions. He doesn’t want another hiccup in the stock market, which has reacted negatively to Trump’s previous talk of firing Powell.
So, if Donald the genius builder was wrong about the cost overruns being more than advertised, what else could he have gotten wrong?
How about the fact that the Federal Reserve paid for the construction of both of its buildings and is paying for the renovations of the Eccles building from its own funds, over which the Executive Department of the federal government—that would be Donald Trump—has no control or authority whatsoever. Neither does the Congress, which did not appropriate the funds for either Fed building from the public tax coffers. Federal Reserve money is paying for the whole thing.
The cost overruns on the renovation are in line with every other construction project in Washington D.C., as it happens. Buildings as old as the Fed’s headquarters, built in 1935, have to undergo removal of lead and asbestos, just for starters. And then there is the involvement of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, which both oversee all building projects in Washington to make sure that they meet D.C. building codes and adhere to the federal classical style, which is mandated for government buildings in the nation’s capital.
And then there is the fact that the site of the entire Mall, on which the Fed headquarters sits, is filled with sediment dredged from the Potomac River to erase the creeks and swamps that once existed there. Part of the Fed renovation is to turn the building’s subterranean parking garage into new office space, necessitating the placement of 1,000 “micro-piles” beneath the building’s foundation, which are used when the ground does not permit the driving of regular construction piles.
The short answer: Costs go up, driven by building codes, redesigns, and the natural conditions of building on a former swamp. Powell knew this, and he knew the money in the cost overruns is Federal Reserve money, not Treasury funds. Trump didn’t.
This is what you get when a bumbling buffoon is elected to high office. But we knew that. And it’s what happens when the bumbling buffoon is consumed with ginning up as many distractions as possible to point the attention of his MAGA base and the media away from the real story in Washington D.C.: what is in the Epstein files? We already know the name of Donald Trump is in there, because the Wall Street Journal, already facing a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump, continues to report on details that keep coming its way from within the Trump White House.
And now Trump has to contend with the creators of the animated show, “South Park,” signing a $1.5 billion deal with Trump’s favorite media conglomerate, Paramount, to produce 50 new scathing episodes over the next five years, during four of which Donald Trump will be one of their biggest targets. The episode dropped last night skewered, among other things, Trump’s blackmail of Paramount for $16 million to settle yet another Trump lawsuit and closed with an AI-generated video of the Trump character wandering a desert, removing one piece of clothing after another until he is naked.
Dealing with South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, newly seated on a pile of Paramount money 100 times bigger than the amount Trump squeezed out of the conglomerate, is going to have him posting Epstein excuses with one thumb and South Park attacks with the other.
I’m thinking this is going to be one of the best August recesses ever.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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