Philadelphia DA says he'll keep piece of Trump's White House ballroom 'after we all blow it up'

A sitting district attorney, the top law enforcement official in Philadelphia, says he wants to keep a piece of the White House as a souvenir after it gets "blown up." Not a protester outside a rally. Not some anonymous account online. The guy whose job is to decide who gets charged with threatening public officials and buildings.

Imagine the reaction if a Republican prosecutor had said this about anything Obama or Biden built. It would be the lead story on every network for a week, and rightly so. Instead we get a shrug, because Krasner has spent years being treated as a folk hero by outlets that only discover a concern for "violent rhetoric" when it points in one direction. That double standard is the actual story here, more than the ballroom itself.

Maybe he meant it as some kind of joke about the ballroom being torn down after Trump leaves office. Fine. Prosecutors don't get to talk like this and expect everyone to assume good faith. Words like "blow it up" carry weight when they come from someone who prosecutes people for making threats against property and public figures. If a private citizen said this about a courthouse or a police station, Krasner's office would want to know a lot more about what they meant.

The White House isn't Trump's personal building. It belongs to the country, through every administration that comes and goes. Treating it as a target for a future demolition party, even in jest, says more about how normalized this kind of talk has become than it does about any renovation plan.