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For 10 years, the Republican Party had been building a cathedral to one man's vanity, brick by obedient brick. Now the roof had fallen in, and Donald Trump was cheerfully supervising the construction of another.
"Raise high the roof beam, carpenters," the president might as well have commanded the morning after his MAGA movement melted like the gilded polyurethane wall ornaments festooned throughout the White House.
As one gable came crashing down, another was going up, with room for the chandeliers, the magnificent marble, and the colossal self-regard of a president who had just watched his political empire suffer a historic electoral humiliation.
Texas had turned blue. Vice President J.D. Vance had turned green at the prospect of inheriting the wreckage. Fox News had gone white with disbelief, while Newsmax was purple with the strain of explaining how an electoral massacre was another Trump triumph. Republicans were contemplating subpoenas, unemployment, and the terrible prospect of discovering what their colleagues actually thought of them. The Grand Old Party had gone kersplat.
Inside the unfinished White House ballroom, Trump was positively serene.
“Now envision chandeliers all over,” he instructed the reporters.
J.D. Salinger would have recognized the scene. His books have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, including more than 65 million copies of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Make no mistake. Salinger was the defining literary voice of American youth during Trump’s generation, coming of age after World War II, the patron saint of adolescents who suspected the adult world was run by phonies, lunatics, and people who talked too much at weddings.
His 1955 novella “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” concerns a wedding that never quite happens, a groom who never appears, and bewildered people trapped together in a car, trying to make sense of an absent man.
The groom is Seymour Glass, a profoundly sensitive, spiritually elusive character who cannot bring himself to participate in the ceremony arranged around him.
Trump is no Seymour Glass. Seymour's problem is that he feels too much of the world's absurdity. Trump's peculiar gift lies in his apparent ability to disregard it when reality threatens his preferred narrative.
But the president bears an extraordinary resemblance to the other great presence in Salinger's story: the wedding party itself.
These people chatter, speculate, take offense, manufacture explanations, and become increasingly hysterical about a man whose intentions they cannot comprehend.
Substitute Republican senators for wedding guests, a White House construction site for the matrimonial festivities, and an electoral catastrophe for the missing groom.
Everybody wants to know where the hell the president is.
And there he is, admiring a beam.
“See the thickness and size of that steel?” he asked.
Meanwhile, the world looked on with the peculiar mixture of wonder and dread reserved for spectacles too absurd to comprehend and too dangerous to ignore.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared that Americans had voted against hatred, sexism, climate denialism, and elite privilege. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa anticipated “a new era in world relations.” Poland's Donald Tusk was positively jubilant: “Today democracy has won in America. I love democracy; it's a beautiful thing.”
Trump says he loves Italian marble.
The Republicans had spent a decade building their political fortunes around one man. Now the voters had delivered their verdict, and the man at the top was explaining the finer points of marble.
What fascinates him is the tangible. Marble exists. Steel exists. You can hang a chandelier, demolish a wall, or relocate a staircase. These things obey an authority that voters, judges, foreign governments, and even vice presidents stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.
A building does not announce that it has lost confidence in its architect.
And here Salinger's title becomes unbearably appropriate.
"Raise high the roof beam, carpenters" comes from an ancient Greek wedding song, invoking the extraordinary height required to accommodate a magnificent bridegroom.
Trump raises actual roof beams, as though the dimensions of a building might establish the dimensions of the man.
“The entire building, every single hole was perfect,” he announced while a crane operator struggled to maneuver a steel beam into position.
A magnificent American parable. The president proclaimed perfection while the machinery clanged against reality. Salinger understood the difference between spiritual grandeur and social performance. Trump has made a career of confusing the two.
One administration official actually suggested he might have been better off eating a pint of ice cream. Another ally thought him visibly shaken.
Perhaps. But the president eventually offered something approaching an accidental confession.
“I like it. It’s good. For me, it’s relaxing.”
There it was.
Not policy. Not history. Not even vanity.
Just relief.
Salinger's characters’ search for authenticity beneath the elaborate social machinery of American life. Trump searches for it in a quarry whose owner, he proudly explained, liked him enough to surrender a coveted vein of marble.
For Seymour Glass, the problem was how to live in a world of unbearable phoniness. For Donald Trump and his family, the problem is how to keep building a world in which the phoniness never has to end.
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