THERE is rightful outrage at President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House. But the tacky gilded ballroom that will replace it is less worrying than what it signals. Because no-one partially bulldozes a historic landmark to build a ballroom they will only have access to for less than three years.

The tourists staring in disbelief through the fence at the wreckage need to understand that what Trump is telegraphing is that he has absolutely no intention of leaving the building once his presidential term is up.

We don’t even need to read the tea leaves to know this. We were told directly last Thursday by one of Trump’s former sleazes-in-chief, Steve Bannon, in a video interview with two editors from the Economist. “Trump is going to be president in ’28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon told them, then warned ominously: “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan.”

The endpoint right now is “we are in charge. We control the institutions, we control the political process,” Bannon said. “All we care about is victory begets victory begets victory,” he added. “We are not going to back off until we get it.”

Rest assured, the need for a “plan” is a sure indication that these ambitions will not be achieved via a legitimate democratic election. Just like the 90,000-square-foot ballroom — a structure that will be almost twice the size of the main White House building itself — Trump is here to stay and views himself, and his hold on power, as indestructible.

From the beginning of Trump’s second term, this already felt like a quiet coup, made more obvious lately with the National Guard on the streets of major cities, immigrants snatched from their homes and workplaces, the federal workforce gutted, the media muzzled and national institutions defunded.

Members of the National Guard are usually part-time ex-military who answer to state authorities and are used during civil emergencies such as natural disasters. But Trump has already federalised them in four states — California, Oregon, Illinois and Texas — in order to deploy them under his command. The National Guard also remains present in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, Republican-controlled legislatures in a number of states have begun frantically redrawing constituency boundaries to ensure a monopoly for their party in the mid-term elections in November 2026, hoping to retain their current majority in both the US House and Senate.

Trump’s demolition derby in DC began metaphorically with the takeover in February of another Washington landmark, the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts. Trump replaced 18 board members with his own cronies, who duly elected him president after he had already fired the incumbent one. He has since threatened to rename the place after himself.

The blueprint for the coup, the Project 2025 handbook produced by the Heritage Foundation, has served as Trump’s 900-page script from the start. In it, the word “dominance” appears 35 times, which, like some bargain-basement Blofeld, is exactly what Trump is after.

And those ambitions do not seem to stop at the US borders. The US President continues to blow tiny boats out of Venezuelan waters, whose crews might be drug-runners or simply just Caribbean fishermen, but who cares because, as Trump put it so eloquently: “We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.”

He has now dangerously escalated the situation, sending a veritable armada toward Venezuela, including the world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R Ford, joining other destroyers, fighter jets and even a nuclear-powered submarine.

These manoeuvres could be a distraction, or the bulldozing of the White House East Wing could be, designed to ensure we don’t notice what should truly be shocking us, the way in which Trump is destroying the economy and the country. A similar diversionary tactic worked for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982 with the Falklands war, as her government — and the country’s economy — stood on the brink of collapse.

The White House ballroom, which Trump says will cost $300 million, is being paid for by corporate donors, including Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple, as well as nuclear weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, and AI data company Palantir. That in itself is indicative of the corporate control and influence already inside the other parts of the White House that are still standing.

But while no tanks may (yet) be rolling through US streets, the more typical indication of a coup, we are still in “an authoritarian takeover,” said progressive Democrat Party Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, in a recording made for Instagram.

“Literally, Trump is tearing down government by and for the people to replace it with an authoritarian state by and for the powerful. And here he’s just symbolising that in his attack and destruction of the White House known as the People’s House,” Merkley said.

“This is the way democracies die now, not with men with guns but with a president who’s an incredibly aggressive authoritarian, a rubber-stamp Congress, and a Supreme Court that’s giving the president more and more power,” Merkley warned.

During the al-Qaida attacks of September 11 2001, there was considerable alarm that the fourth terrorist-controlled passenger plane, United Flight 93, was headed for the White House. Instead, as the passengers frantically attempted to take control of the plane, it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

On that day, the White House was spared. No-one expected then that a US president would later finish the job.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.