Trump Administration Opens White House Movie Theater to East Wing Tours
In one of the Trump administration’s more agreeable defilings of decades-long tradition, the White House’s ritzy movie theater will now be available to those visitors touring the building’s East Wing. Say what you will about the new Commander-in-Chief, but at least he’s going to allow the general public a glimpse of how the most powerful man in the nation took in Finding Dory.
Since the required technology was first made commercially available (that would be 1942, installed on a request from Franklin Delano Roosevelt), sitting Presidents have unwound from the stresses of leading the nation with an in-house motion picture. The current design of the plush room includes 51 seats, an expansion undertaken during the Reagan years. And while the movie diet of the President has long been public knowledge and subject to sometimes hilarious granular scrutiny —what did Barack Obama’s praise for La La Land say about his policies on China? — the actual conditions in which they’re seen have long been kept private.
The Hollywood Reporter notes a post from Melania Trump’s Instagram account in which the First Lady declared the room as a new inclusion to tours through the East Wing of the White House, playing up her husband’s for-the-people rhetoric even in this minor announcement:
It’s an illuminating peek into the leisure life of the President, but this development still leaves a lot of questions. What’s the Presidential snack food of choice? Knowing what he knows now, would Trump repeat his request to screen Why Him as a plan B in the event that Finding Dory was unavailable? Where does he stand on the neo-Malick wars? I am a one-issue voter, and that issue is whether Trump agrees that Unforgettable is an unheralded triumph.