Saikat Chakrabarti wants to turn Trump’s gilded ballroom into a museum on authoritarianism
Rooting out corruption in government is at the center of Saikat Chakrabarti’s campaign for Congress. And if elected next year, the 39-year-old former Silicon Valley engineer – now running to succeed Nancy Pelosi in her long-held San Francisco seat – says he would put it on display for every American to see.
As part of his anti-corruption agenda, Chakrabarti says he would introduce legislation to turn Donald Trump’s gilded White House ballroom into the “Smithsonian Museum on Corruption and Authoritarianism”. Looking ahead to a post-Trump Washington, Chakrabarti envisions filling the 90,000 sq ft structure, to be built in place of the now-demolished East Wing, with exhibits dedicated to the “modern dangers posed by the current wannabe dictator, the ongoing threat of authoritarianism, assaults on the rule of law and the pervasive corruption of the billionaire class”.
“There’s going to have to be this moment of reckoning in the whole country after this Trump administration where we actually call out everything that just happened,” he said in an interview previewing the proposal, first shared with the Guardian. “We need to teach the history about how we got there and how we don’t get there again.”
