DICTATOR VIBES

Trump Goon Gives Bonkers Speech at Putin’s Davos

The president’s fine arts chief is in St. Petersburg showing off plans for the White House ballroom.

Donald Trump’s favorite architect is in Russia parading designs for the president’s D.C. vanity projects at Vladimir Putin’s knockoff version of Davos.

Rodney Mims Cook Jr., whom Trump appointed as chair of the Commission of Fine Arts last January, delivered his speech on White House efforts to make over the U.S. capital during a panel discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—a Russian analog to the annual World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

“The president has asked me to help him oversee an addition to the White House,” Cook preened as he addressed the roundtable, sitting beside American actor Steven Seagal, himself a known Putin apologist.

“This is the White House ballroom wing,” Cook told the panel, presenting a mock-up of the gleaming marble monument now being constructed on the site where the building’s historic East Wing once stood.

Trump’s ballroom project at the White House has come under intense fire from preservationists for demolishing 123 years of U.S. history. Government ethics watchdogs have also blasted the fact that the bulk of its funding has come from corporations and billionaires with significant business pending before the administration.

Its price tag has ballooned from $200 million to $400 million, and could soon include a further $1 billion of taxpayer money if a Senate Republican bill earmarking that sum for “security” around the project becomes law. Trump had initially pledged that not a single taxpayer dollar would go toward the project.

Cook was even more gleeful presenting the president’s plans for an “Arc de Trump” near Arlington National Cemetery, itself loosely modeled on the “Arc de Triomphe” of Paris fame.

“The president’s arch is 166 feet tall. I assist him and oversee that as well,” Cook gloated. “The president is very proud of this.”

He said they’d encountered “some issues” with the fastenings for a figure to be installed at the top of the monument. “I said, ‘Mr President, I think your angel might fly up to Arlington House with a wind gust,” he quipped to zero laughter from his fellow panelists.

Cook concluded his parade of Trump’s D.C. vanity projects by noting there has been “some interesting humor in America” comparing the president’s arch project to the garish “Golden Arches” of the McDonald’s logo. Again, not even a smirk from others around the table.

The moderator remarked after Cook was done talking that after such an “extensive overview” of these and other feats throughout the architect’s career, he was “really puzzled as to who I should next pass the floor.”

Critics have repeatedly blasted Trump’s self-iconographizing plans for the nation’s capital—such as his “American Flag Blue” refurb of the Reflecting Pool and rebranding the Kennedy Center in his own name—as giving off dictatorial vibes.

If those efforts failed to impress Cook’s fellow panelists, it’s likely because Putin is himself the world’s dictator-supreme, with a litany of his own vanity projects to show for it—such as his $1.3 billion Black Sea palace, or the record-breaking $50 billion his government spent on the Sochi Olympics, or the $3.6 billion bridge he built to annexed Crimea, to name but a few.

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Cook is the first U.S. official to attend the St. Petersburg forum since then-ambassador John Tefft in 2017, before the war in Ukraine. Most Western governments and companies have boycotted the forum since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Accompanied by Kremlin sycophant Steven Seagal, he’s nevertheless part of a larger contingent Trump is reported to have dispatched to represent U.S. interests at this year’s event. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted to lawmakers during a Senate hearing earlier in the day that he had no idea a U.S. delegation was there.

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Trump’s Arts Chief Says One Supersized Arch Isn’t Enough

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“I’m not aware of the delegation that went,” he told Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin. “I’m aware of the event, I know they were hosting one. But I don’t think it will have been a high-level official…”

“I’m not sure what level it is,” Durbin interjected. “But to think we had anything official that included Steven Seagal, the actor, as one of the people representing the United States…”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.

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