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Donald Trump has literally taken a wrecking ball to the White House — and US courts seem helpless to stop him.

The East Wing was destroyed without civic debate or congressional approval – and is now in the process of being replaced by a 90,000 square foot luxury ballroom that is double the size of the current White House complex.

That is an insult to the rule of law, to American history, and to every US citizen — because the White House ultimately belongs to us, not its current temporary occupant.

If you don’t believe this is a dangerous precedent, get your head around this: The Trump administration’s Department of Justice lawyers even argued in court that a president could order the Statue of Liberty demolished and there would be functionally nothing anyone could do about it because the courts would move too slowly to stop him.

The Supreme Court just proved them right. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three Democratic-appointed justices in trying to halt the destruction of the East Wing. Roberts wrote that the construction is likely unlawful because Congress never approved it.

He’s got the facts on his side. The Constitution gives Congress the power to make all rules respecting “property belonging to the United States.” For two centuries the White House has been renovated and maintained through congressional authorization and appropriation. Alteration and improvement of the executive residence has never meant unilateral demolition.

But in an assault on precedent, Roberts and the Democratic Justices were outvoted by the other five Republican court appointees, who, in an unsigned order, said nothing about whether the project was legal. They said only that the National Trust for Historic Preservation likely lacked standing to sue.

So who does have standing if they don’t? The answer should be “any American citizen.” This is our history and our legacy. There are laws to ensure that no president can act like a king and destroy historic public property on a whim.

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The National Trust stated the principle plainly after the ruling. “We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court’s ruling today,” said its president and CEO, Brent Leggs. The order “does not resolve our fundamental argument: that each president is a temporary steward of the People’s House and does not have the unilateral authority to demolish and redesign it without the approval of Congress,” concluding that the Trust “will continue to advocate, with our partners, on behalf of the American people, the democratic values of our nation, and the preservation of our country’s most historically significant places.”

But the Trump bum rush goes on. By the government’s own account in court filings, a 250-person crew has been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, ignoring lower court riders. The administration told the courts the structure is “beyond the point of return.” The goal is a fait accompli: by the time judges definitively rule on legality, the ballroom will be built.

This is an Atlantic City mob-boss tactic, and it fits a pattern. Trump has tried to remake the Kennedy Center in his own image. He paved the Rose Garden. He’s building a massive triumphal arch and suggested naming it after himself. He has slapped gilded skid marks on every surface of the White House. The gilding can be scraped off. Buildings cannot be un-demolished.

If you have any doubt that this is all about Trump’s endlessly needy ego, listen to the Don himself: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

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Then there’s the money. Trump promised that the ballroom would be built with “ZERO Dollars of Taxpayer Money” – funded by himself and donors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Coinbase – corporations that understand every decision with this president is transactional. But the price tag swelled from $200 million to $400 million in five months. A side staircase to nowhere disappeared and then reappeared. The contractor’s own estimate now puts the real cost at $600 million, with roughly half that coming from the Secret Service and the White House. That’s your money. Senate Republicans proposed another $1 billion in federal money for “security adjustments and upgrades” tied to the project. The donors get naming rights. Taxpayers get the bill.

If you want to know how a mob boss runs a public works project, look at the Reflecting Pool. The job went, no-bid, to a contractor Trump said had built one of his own swimming pools. A firm with actual Reflecting Pool experience had passed because the July 4 deadline was unworkable. The blue coating peeled. Algae took over. So the boss found a guy to take the fall. The guy was David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist accused of massive vandalism with a box cutter – a felony carrying up to 10 years. His crime, by his account, was stopping to look and dipping his hand in the water. Then Jeanine Pirro broke omertà and uncharacteristically told the truth. On July 31, she moved to dismiss the charges, writing that the rush produced hasty, botched work in the reflecting pool. But Roy Cohen’s clients never admit making a mistake. They double down on the lie. So Trump disagreed “100 percent.” He expects his lawyers to lie on his behalf. Lincoln’s mirror is now a $14 million mudhole.

Republicans would be screaming bloody murder if a Democratic president tried anything remotely like this. And they’d be right to. Principles don’t matter if you abandon them whenever a president of your own party does as he pleases. The guardrails that once relied on a president’s common sense and common decency clearly cannot be taken for granted anymore.

So here is a modest proposal. The Democrats running for president should pledge to take down Trump’s luxury ballroom and rebuild the East Wing as it was, restoring the historic symmetry of the White House. Whatever underground security structures have been built should stay: anything practical and related to national security belongs there. But the monument to one man’s ego above ground should be swept into the ash-heap of history.

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When the remaining Republican justices finally solve the mystery of who has standing to stop the destruction of the White House it will be after Trump leaves office. They will conclude the demolition was illegal — and then declare on those grounds that the next president cannot possibly demolish Trump’s ballroom. But that would let the crime stand without any accountability. The purpose of this proposal is not to perpetuate Trump’s cycle of destruction but to end it, by ensuring there is a consequence for breaking the law, and making sure it can never happen again.

Trump took a wrecking ball to the People’s House. The people should reserve the right to take one to his ballroom. %!s()

In Food Devils, players are a chef recruiting demons so they can survive in a post-apocalyptic world. You attract those demons (physically and romantically) by cooking for them. To get the ingredients for that food, players have to hunt and kill enemies in grid-based tactical battles reminiscent of Fire Emblem games. After that, players can customize and serve food at their restaurant, which will be visited by adventurers, and gain the attention of the five titular Food Devils, with whom players forge a Devil Contract or romance.

If that sounds like a lot of gameplay systems, well, it is. Ahead of the announcement, Studio Daimon offered Polygon a deep-dive interview into many of the game's core mechanics. The developer highlighted how all of Food Devils' systems cleverly intertwine and (for lack of a better word) feed back into one another. Game director Alfred Kamon also pointed out some of the conventional Fire Emblem gameplay systems that Food Devils turns on its head.

An exclusive interview with the developers of Food Devils

Image: Studio Daimon

Food Devils mixes a ton of different elements — what makes those systems feel like parts of one game rather than separate modes, and what’s the best example of them feeding into each other?

Alfred Kamon, game director on Food Devils: One of the main goals while designing Food Devils was to make every system feed into the next one. You hunt monsters to get ingredients, cook those ingredients into dishes that buff your party, customize the restaurant to attract different adventurers, then bring those adventurers back into the next expedition. Even the story is structured around that loop, because characters react to what happens during runs and the restaurant keeps evolving between them.

A simple example is recruitment. Changing your furniture changes the kind of adventurers who visit and their personal traits. The food you cook affects general stats for your next expedition, like healing potency or movement. So the restaurant isn't meant to feel like a separate management chore — it's actually the relaxing half of the tactics game. And while we put a lot of care into the food animations, we didn't add any cooking minigames on purpose, because we knew our players would want to jump right back into character relationships and tactical gameplay.

The Devil Contract system can completely reclass an adventurer depending on which Devil they partner with. How dramatically can that change the way the same character plays, and what kinds of strategies does that open up from run to run?

Pretty dramatically. An adventurer is summoned with specific stats and personal traits. Then a Devil Contract can reclass them, change their appearance, and give them a different starting toolkit, so the same person can fill a very different role depending on which Devil is captaining the expedition.

That also means you can take an adventurer you like, pair them with a different Devil, and suddenly you're building around a completely different set of strengths and synergies. Then the roguelite layer pushes it further: Skill Packs and Events let you evolve that version of the unit throughout the run, while Master Rules reshape the strategy you're building around. Ideally, you can look at the same Shielder-class adventurer and think, "Will you grant Armor and push enemies away during this run, or will you summon a swarm of Bombees and heal poisoned allies?"

Image: Studio Daimon

Calories and Hunger are described as one of the game’s twists on traditional tactics RPG combat. How do those systems actually change the decisions a player makes during an expedition compared with something like Fire Emblem?

As a huge Fire Emblem fan, I've always found it funny that your "Jagen" characters (the pre-promoted veterans) often end up benched because they're too strong or steal EXP from the rest of the army. Food Devils kind of flips that idea. Every expedition has one Devil as your absurdly powerful "pre-promote", and up to four human adventurers.

Here's the catch: Devils need Calories to perform their powerful attacks, and the humans generate those Calories by interacting with the battlefield. At the beginning of each run, you choose a Master Rule that defines how you'll generate them: it might be something as weird as ending your movement next to a Bonfire, or making your summons explode. I know, Devils can be quite capricious at times.

The humans are far from dead weight, though. With the right skills and combinations, they can do a lot of the work themselves. And there's a price: every Calorie generated also inflicts 1 Hunger on that adventurer, and too much Hunger can kill them permanently. So you're constantly deciding how much you're willing to squeeze out of your humans to empower the Devil. That balance between greed and safety is one of my favorite parts of a run, and it's inspired by some of my favorite roguelikes, like Darkest Dungeon and Aethermancer.

The game tracks the “culture” of your restaurant based on things like how aggressively or peacefully you play. What are some ways a player’s combat style or cooking choices can unexpectedly change characters, relationships, or the story?

Food Devils takes some time to introduce its evolving mechanics, lore and characters. But once the player is familiar with the world, choices start to carry more weight. These world-changing features are still in development, but the intention is to make the player's chosen "gameplay route" feel increasingly reflected in the world itself.

For example, if you develop the restaurant according to Poison Devil's progress-obsessed advice, money may eventually be introduced into what starts as a completely free restaurant, and you'll be able to purchase scientifically enhanced starting skills. Follow Vegan Devil's ideals instead, and you can unlock a pacifist route where neutralizing monsters is favored over killing them.

The idea is that aligning yourself with a Devil also means engaging with their ideology, and eventually allowing that ideology to affect the main mechanics of the game.

You can romance the Food Devils, but you can also influence their relationships with one another. How do those relationships affect the actual strategy game, and what did you want this system to do that players wouldn’t normally get from a traditional RPG romance system?

I love romance in my RPGs, but I've always found it a bit strange when the relationship stops existing after the confession scene, aside from maybe some stat bonuses or slightly different dialogue. In Food Devils, relationships are part of progression because a Devil is literally an embodiment of Appetite — a very strong drive and ideology. The more you nurture that Appetite through quests and support conversations, the more powerful that Devil can become, unlocking new meta-progression abilities.

You can also encourage the Devils to grow closer to each other, and those bonds can affect the strategic options available to you. For example, normally, if you select Hunter Devil as the captain of your expedition, all of your adventurers use Hunter's Devil Contract. But if Hunter somehow grows fond of Poison, he'll allow some of them to use Poison's Contract instead. This creates a unique mix of starting skills and Master Rules that can push the run towards some extremely fun combos.

Some Support conversations are also key to developments in the main story. In general, I know players are attracted to the designs of our Devils, and I wanted to give them not only satisfying dialogue, but also consequences that make their choices feel alive. Oh, and spicy dialogue. Because there isn't nearly enough spiciness in non-erotic RPGs nowadays.

Image: Studio Daimon

If Studio Daimon's erotic, genre-mashing Food Devils sounds intriguing to you, we thankfully don't have to wait too much longer to play it. Food Devils will be released Nov. 5, and already has a four-hour free demo that you can check out on Steam. %!s()

There comes a time in every person's life when they ask themselves, "Am I the kind of person who could be lured by the intrinsic qualities of a basic British sports car, or do I prefer a life with no joy whatsoever?" Few choices are quite as important.

I, for one, have spent my entire adult life surrounded by British sports cars. Heck, there are two of them lurking in my garage right now. Do they run? No. Am I ever going to get around to restoring them? Um, I'll get back to you on that.

Because of my affection, or some might say, affliction, for old British sports cars, I was salivating to see last Friday's 1973 Morgan Plus 8 roadster come our way. At its $23,500 asking price, I even contemplated its purchase, if only for a minute. We already have a Plus 4 in the family, so it would prove unnecessarily redundant. Unfortunately for its seller, few of you share my passion for oil leaks, weak electrics, and bugs in the teeth from miles of smiles that a British sports car provides, giving that Morgan a 62% 'No Dice' send-off to end last week.

Lasten-Transporter

There is, perhaps, no van more famous than Volkswagen's Type 2 Transporter. Beloved by hippies and high school history teachers alike, the VW Bus has become an iconic—and shockingly expensive to buy—classic vehicle. But did you know that the Volkswagen bus had a bigger, harder-working sibling? Dubbed the LT for Lasten-Transporter, or "heavy load transporter," this series of commercial vans and platform bodies entered the market in 1975. It was built across two series for the next 20 years.

This 1989 LT35 is a first-generation model, with a top 3.5-ton carrying capacity for the time. Like most American vans of the 1960s, the LT is a forward-control design, with the engine sitting between the seats, driving the rear axle. Unlike most American vans of the 1960s, the LT series was never offered in the U.S., meaning this one was privately imported. It does wear Smokey the Bear Oregon license plates, so one would expect that all the rigmarole involved in its importation and licensure is complete and put to bed. The ad does note that it has a clean title.

Red suspenders

Where did it come from? Well, based on the writing on the front doors, it's from Ohlenberg, Germany, where it served in a volunteer fire brigade. That past life is also evident in the FEUERWEHR (fire department) painted on the nose, a pair of blue gumballs on the roof, and the dusky red paint the van wears. It's kitschy and totally fun that the van still wears its fire service uniform, even now in its retirement.

Under all that is a massively roomy box of a van that, unique for its era, has sliding side doors on both sides. Other notable features of the exterior include an add-on roof rack with awnings, what look to be sirens, and a ladder on one rear door.

Power for the LT35 comes from a 2,383cc carbureted straight-six producing 89 horsepower. That's mated to a four-speed manual driving the live rear axle, and the suspension is by semi-elliptic leaf springs all around. According to the ad, the van has 63,000 kilometers on the clock—about 40,000 miles—and is described as "a very fun, reliable camper van."

Van life

That camper description is due to the updates and additions made to the interior. Those include a bed platform with storage beneath and a kitchen counter in the back. There's no running water, ice chest, or built-in stove, but there is a stainless steel counter and even more storage. Ahead of all that, there's a rear-facing jump seat and the two forward-facing seats in the cab. It all appears to be in good shape, but it would have benefited from the seller removing all their random crap from the dash and console before taking the pictures.

The exterior is remarkably straight given the van's age and former vocation. Yes, the paint is faded, but that patina only adds to the intrinsic charm. One of the rear bumperettes is missing, but that seems to be the only AWOL element. On the plus side, the glass is intact, and the seller says the truck comes with brand-new tires as an added incentive.

Kayaks not included

There is something about old VW vans that, like puppies or garlic fries, just puts a smile on people's faces. This LT35 is an oddball VW van here in the States, so it's even more of a draw. It comes with all the camper gear, but not the two kayaks on the roof. For anyone not into the kayak lifestyle, that's likely a moot point, but if anyone is looking to buy this VW specifically for the kayaks, well, they'll be SOL.

For the rest of us, however, it is now time to consider this VW Van's $12,000 asking price. Is that a fair asking price for so weird and wonderful a camper conversion as one is likely to find? Or is that too much for this former fire department van, even if you had the money burning a hole in your pocket?

You decide!

Portland, Oregon, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

Hat tip to Don R. for the hookup!

Help me out with Nice Price or No Dice. Hit me up at [email protected] and send a fixed-price tip. Remember to include your commenter handle. %!s()

In “Imperium,” working with 60 hours of 16mm, the master documentarian organizes this journey along geographic lines, starting in Moscow and heading east, then doubling back through “the Stans” and the Baltic republics until ending in what was then Leningrad. As with Loznitsa’s past films of this type, some snippets of conversation and music have been added, but otherwise the footage has simply been restored and edited together. What’s revealed is an immense state whose distinct regions still managed to hold onto unique traditions, notwithstanding an incessant centralized proclamation of unity.

While “Imperium” can be engrossing, its nearly three-hour running time is felt more than in Loznitsa masterpieces like “Maidan” and “State Funeral.” Perhaps that’s because in those films, one feels the force of history pushing us forward, inexorably heading to a watershed moment whose impact continues to resonate across the decades. With “Imperium,” the motivation is clear yet the concept is more diffuse. It’s also a film which will likely resonate best with those of us old enough to recall how the Soviet Union was discussed in the West at the time, a decade before Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” remark — which simply gave a reductivist Star Wars moniker to the anti-communist propaganda suffusing American-driven global discourse since the end of the Second World War. For Loznitsa, of course, his interest is inside the country rather than how it was perceived from abroad, though it will be impossible for most audiences to separate the two.

The film kicks off with a classic parade in Red Square for the 24th Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, with banners touting the same slogans from the previous forty years about production targets being met ahead of schedule. Next comes the GUM department store and window displays with tuxedos, shiny patent leather shoes and beaded handbags, making us wonder who in early 1970s Moscow was buying such luxury goods. Commercialized religion makes its first appearance with a lively trade in Christmas decorations, one of many reminders that despite an official policy of atheism, certain traditions were allowed to persist. (Vladimir Putin, of course, has done an even better job in harnessing religion to his oligarchic dictatorship.)

From the capital the footage moves east, where consumer goods are far more difficult to obtain. In Suzdal, an old woman washes clothes in an ice hole; shots of Vladimir show a town seemingly unchanged from pre-Revolutionary days; further south, residents come out for a winter carnival whose roots must date long before Leninism arrived. As the cameramen spread east, local customs become stronger: Bactrian camel races near the Mongolian border, reindeer sleds in the Sakha Republic. It’s here in Siberia where the footage most forcefully critiques Soviet policy, as a group of young Caucasian Russians (in classic 1970s fashion) play guitar and sing Russian songs, the local Yakut population looking on from the sidelines, discontented observers of this not-so-subtle form of colonialism.

The greatest takeaway from “Imperium” is just how stubbornly resistant centuries-old traditions were to the Soviet push towards uniformity. People still attended mosques in Bukhara and churches in Etchmiadzin, they held on to ways of life that had not been collectivized by Stalinist dictates. Today, however, rampant capitalism and the internet have changed Russia’s social landscape far more than anything Lenin or Brezhnev could have imagined, turning stubbornly multicultural populations that boldly resisted homogeneity into consumers looking West for their acquisitions.

It’s interesting to imagine what might have happened had Italian TV screened the majority of these films upon release. A sense of what life was really like in the Soviet Union was hard to come by then — in the U.S., a 1977 National Geographic publication “Journey Across Russia: The Soviet Union Today” was the first populist corrective to the sense of a uniform society of collectivized proletariat.

Italy, with its strong communist party, had a different problem, too often refusing to acknowledge Politburo abuses. An interesting companion piece to “Imperium” would be Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini’s 2013 documentary “The Train to Moscow: A Journey to Utopia,” also consisting of found footage but earlier, when a party supporter from Emilia Romagna discovered that life in the USSR wasn’t all solidarity and freedom. At the time, his Italian colleagues censored his revelations. All empires peddle utopias, but why do so many people believe them? %!s()

The film debuts at the Venice Film Festival, then moves to the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Produced by Vitrine Filmes and Homegreen Films, with backing from the Basque regional government’s culture and language department, the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation and Tabakalera, “Dust” continues a project Tsai launched in 2012 built around a single recurring image: Lee Kang-sheng walking in near-stillness through unfamiliar cities, his body tracing how a place is felt and moved through over time.

Tsai traces the whole project back to a stage production more than a decade ago, where a slow-walking performance by Lee left a lasting mark on him. “At the time, I had grown tired of making narrative films, and Lee’s slow walk gave me the idea of making something non-narrative, a form of pure visual expression,” he says. “The way he walks is extraordinarily beautiful, and the idea of ‘slowness’ itself has great power.” What still strikes him, after 15 years of filming the same gesture, is Lee’s physical control: “He is still able to maintain the same power he had at the very beginning.”

Spain entered the picture through a co-production partner. Tsai says he scouted San Sebastian twice before settling on it, taken with the city itself but even more with what surrounded it: “Basque stone houses, an abandoned mining tunnel, the tremendous force of the waves crashing against the Peine del Viento, the sound of church bells surrounding San Sebastian and the face of an elderly Basque farmer.”

That patience is, for Tsai, the whole point of the exercise. Cinema, he argues, has trained audiences to treat images as information to be processed rather than looked at. “Slowness may simply be a method: it allows you to become quiet, to really look and to feel — to gaze at a face, an object, an event,” he says. “Slowness, in fact, is also a form of rebellion.”

The series has by now carried the Walker from Taipei and Hong Kong through two further shorts shot at a Yunlin exhibition space, on to Kuching, Malaysia; Marseille, France; Tokyo; the Taiwan‘s Yilan coast; Paris; and Washington, D.C., before this latest journey to San Sebastian, and Tsai describes him as a kind of instrument for reading a place. Every city, he says, carries its own atmosphere and pace, and Lee’s shaved head, bare feet and red robe throw that character into relief. In San Sebastian, what caught him was the light: “The sunlight constantly shifting between brightness and shadow, falling across enormous sculptures, forests, streets, pedestrians and the Walker’s red robe. It is very beautiful.”

Underneath the travelogue is a much longer collaboration. Tsai and Lee have worked together for more than 30 years, and the director speaks of the series as something closer to a document of aging than a formal experiment. “We have watched Lee Kang-Sheng’s body, appearance, and even his skin change,” he says. “Only through looking at someone over a long period of time can the reality of a life be fully revealed. To have been able to keep filming Lee Kang-Sheng is the greatest gift heaven has given me.”

Venice has bookended Tsai’s career in its own way. “Vive L’Amour” won the Golden Lion there in 1994; “Dust” returns him to the festival with a film that shares almost nothing with it formally. Tsai frames the distance between the two less as a rupture than as an ongoing argument with the medium itself. Some assume he stopped making films, he says, simply because he stopped making the kind audiences expected: “In fact, I have never stopped making films. I have been searching for the possibilities of cinema: what else can cinema express, besides telling stories?” He questions whether the theater itself has grown too conservative a container: “It should be able to contain all kinds of films, not only narrative films or documentaries. The ‘Walker’ series is clearly neither fiction nor documentary. It is simply a form of cinema, and it deserves to be seen in a cinema.”

He’s less pessimistic about audiences than that argument might suggest. Tsai splits viewers into two camps — one seeking pure entertainment, another open to work that asks more of them — and says the second group hasn’t shrunk. “My films are screened in cities all over the world, and I have found that more and more young people are coming to see them.”

Working with a largely new Spanish crew, he says, didn’t require him to change anything. Tsai has long mixed his longtime Taiwanese team with international crews and film students, and this production was no exception: “I was very satisfied with the Spanish team this time, especially the two cinematographers. I really liked the way they handled the images.”

The series isn’t finished with him yet. The next “Walker” film will take him to Jeonju, Korea, on an invitation from the Jeonju Intl. Film Festival, and Tsai is untroubled by questions about where the project ends. “I think it will end only when either Lee Kang-Sheng or I am no longer here,” he says.

Beyond “Walker,” his ambitions have narrowed rather than faded. “I am getting older now, and I do not have the same energy I once had,” he says. “The one thing I still very much hope to do is to work once more with all the actors I have collaborated with over the years. Perhaps I will make one more narrative film that is not really a narrative film.”

Three decades after his Golden Lion, Tsai returns to Venice with a film that has no plot, no dialogue and, by his own account, no interest in changing that. %!s()