He led an insurrection on live TV, got away with it, and got reelected. Nothing is going to happen until the propaganda machine is torn down; or, more likely, the whole system just caves in on itself under the weight of its own greed and mismanagement.

I'm with you on 1.
But can't on 2.
Everything he did to the White House needs to be reversed.
Then also to the rest of the country.

Rename the ballroom to the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.

You forget another huge thing.

Rip out all the tacky gold fittings that Trump has added all over.

But God help you if you want to remove a statue honoring a Confederate general

Typical urban real estate mogul behavior.

Might as well go back to the 1812 method of renovating at this point.
Probably less insulting to the concept of the USA than whatever the fuck this is.

His entire life has been based around his perception of what people above him think of him. That's why he plastered the oval office with garish gold leaf everywhere. He thinks it will impress people like putin and erdoğan and kim . Even more so,he's showing that he has the power to spend the people's money lavishly on stuff the country doesn't want nor need, because that's what dictators do.

That's what this is for

Because it is not so much a ball room as it is a throne room. He wants a giant hall where he can preside at a throne in the end, where people who wants to see him has to walk through the entire thing feeling humbled, just like his dictator pals does it.

Because the Kremlin has one.

"Distracting headlines" as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#United_States

When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of "distracting headlines" was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.

This isn't a "Trump" problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.

Cracked has an article that points how Trump does know some things to a very high level. One of those things is how media attention works and also a complete and absolute lack of shame.

Him admitting that he tore down part of the white house because he just didn't like it and could have built around it is exactly those two things. He wanted to distract people and he legit does not give a damn.