Trump put a wrecking-ball through the East Wing – and through democratic norms

History has shown us how much dictators and aspiring dictators love building monuments to themselves. They enjoy reminding the world that they can do anything, no matter who is responsible for the physical labor or who will be paying the financial and human cost.

They prefer outsized structures, heroic arches, towers and columns designed to prove that their signature and their esthetic will be with us forever, even after they’re dead, though dictators often seem to believe they are too powerful to die.

There’s a chilling photograph of Hitler in the bunker beneath Berlin, not long before his suicide, contemplating an architectural model of the Austrian city of Linz which he had intended (and perhaps still intended) to rebuild to his specifications.

In Tirana, Albania, is a bizarre glass pyramid that the tyrant Enver Hoxha constructed as a museum about his life, and in which he is now buried. In Rome’s EUR, Mussolini and his city planners designed a neighborhood scaled for the race of Fascist giants to which they imagined they belonged.

So it comes as no surprise that Donald Trump has invested so much energy, sacrificed so much popular goodwill, and already spent a fortune on the East Wing ballroom, a project that will occupy an astonishing 90,000 square feet.

I can’t have been the only person who was shocked and saddened by photos of the jagged, gaping hole in the White House’s east facade, ripped apart by a wrecking crew, and by pictures of the historic rose garden remade to resemble an outdoor food court at a mall.

Also unsurprisingly, estimates of the building’s costs have varied widely, though it’s clear that the price tag will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. ($400m is the most recent figure to have been mentioned.) Though the president has promised that the American tax payer will not be stuck with all or part of the bill, some of the money has already been diverted from publicly funded agencies such as the Secret Service.

And there’s been precious little reporting about who is getting contracts for all this expensive work and about the nature of the contractors’ relationships (financial and personal) with the president.

We were supposed to have been relieved and mollified to learn that the ballroom – a pleasure palace for the president and his most loyal and generous supporters – would occupy a mere 22,000 of those square feet. The remaining 68,000 would provide, as the president wrote in a post, “one big, expensive, and very complex unit, which is vital for National Security and Military Operations!” Beneath the ballroom, a six-story underground bunker, designed to protect our leaders in the event of an attack, will make Hitler’s roomy 3,000 square feet look, by comparison, like a studio apartment. Most recently, Trump discussed using the new building’s roof as a launching pad for killer drones and other lethal weapons.

This clever use of the air space seems to have occurred to the president even after the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit ruled, in a 2-1 decision, that he could not continue renovating the East Wing without congressional approval.

According to Judges Patricia Millet and Bradley Garcia, “each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence”. Brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the reasoning behind the suit seems obvious: a temporary tenant cannot change a rental cottage into a skyscraper without the landlord’s permission.

The legal requirement to ask permission from Congress has already been ignored by a president who has levied tariffs, attacked Venezuela, gutted government institutions and started a war with Iran – all without bothering to consult the elected senators and representatives.

Now Trump has vowed to take the case before the US supreme court which, as we have seen, is inclined to support him, though there have been a few happy surprises when the majority of chief justices decided to uphold the constitution.

Much of what Trump does seems pointless, illogical, a response to some passing whim. But let’s not forget that he has the instincts of an autocrat, that he is the heir to a playbook, a series of actions designed to attain and consolidate increasing power and control.

This story has always been about more than a building, more than about the intentional desecration of a national symbol, of a handsome structure with a history and a meaning. We’ve seen how Trump feels about history when he accused the Smithsonian Institution of being anti-American for telling the truth about our past.

Though the case was initially brought by Alison Hoagland, an architectural historian and a board member of the National Trust, who claimed that the ballroom was an “aesthetic, cultural and historical” affront, it was never as simple as asking a town board to rule that a neighbor can’t build a view-blocking three-story vertical addition on to his house. We know, as the judges must have known, that the whole thing is about control, about the reckless grab for absolute power and about the necessity to resist it.

It might seem like a distraction – a relatively trivial concern – to worry about a building when our government agents are shooting and kidnapping innocent people on our streets. But it’s part of the same story, a narrative about the subversion – at once reckless and calculated – of our ethical and democratic norms.

Like our response to the ruined reflecting pool and the proposed Trump triumphal arch, our reaction to the proposed ballroom is partly about our wanting our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to visit our nation’s capital without having to think about Donald Trump and about how much he did to deface it.

• Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.