As Trump plays human wrecking ball at the White House, why does it hurt so much? And does it really matter?
The answer to that is a big, fucking “yes.”
Donald Trump just sent the bulldozers in to rip out America’s heart.
Because as First Lady Betty Ford said back in her time: “if the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.”
Reuters via Brian Rittmeyer on X
As the East Wing of the People’s House is smashed into bite-sized, (possibly) asbestos-ridden chunks while Trump’s supersize-me American flags flap away in the background, it feels like the beginning — or end — of something significant.
Turns out, only 28 per cent of the American population support the move.
Stephen Colbert puts into words what most of America and the rest of the world feel. The carcass of what was until last week the First Ladies’ wing and grand public entrance to the White House looks like “a rotisserie chicken your dog got into.”
It’s more than just wanton destruction and vandalism.
It’s an attack on the American psyche.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Donald Trump is a dog pissing on a fire hydrant.
The purpose isn’t to relieve his bladder. It’s about covering the scent of the dogs who have been there before.
When the Trump Ballroom rises from the rubble, it will erase centuries of history. Number 47 is claiming the hallowed turf in the most visible of ways.
His message? This is not the People’s House. This is my house.
It’s why he paved over Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden to recreate a Boca Raton shopping mall food court.
Camelot has been supplanted by Sir Lunch-a-lot.
The Rose Garden Club, as it’s now known, comes with tacky patio furniture, striped umbrellas right out of a Slim Aarons photoshoot, and a playlist curated by the President himself.
Yes, YMCA is on repeat. Seriously.
But this is more than just the actions of a man missing the friendly surroundings of Mar-a-Lago.
It’s an aggressive move to erase the legacy of one of America’s most revered First Ladies and that of her husband.
Democrats, both.
Photo by Julien Maculan on Unsplash
Porta-loos and tents
It’s not that the White House couldn’t do with some improvements.
There are plenty of good arguments in favour of the White House having a bigger space to entertain visiting dignitaries. My local pub has a bigger function room.
It’s said that the Trump administration is not alone in its wish for a banqueting space that can fit more than 200 people.
Although they might not admit it in public, members of the Biden and Obama White Houses apparently agree it’s a little bonkers to ask visiting VIPs to use porta-loos when tents are required on the South Lawn for state dinners, which is the status quo.
Even if that’s the case, when someone tears down a building that occupies such a prominent place in the public’s consciousness without consultation or warning, it’s an assault.
Photo by Ksenia Obukhova on Unsplash
The ghosts of First Ladies past
What is America’s 47th president so eager to erase?
Since the 1970s, the East Wing has housed the First Ladies’ offices in the White House.
By levelling it, Trump has gone scorched earth on the place that Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Jill Biden made their own during their time at the White House. I doubt that’s an accident.
Number 47 had already made his presence felt in the corridors of the East Wing. The gargoyle-like portrait with an American flag painted on his features — the same image he uses as an avatar for his Truth Social posts — shouldered its way between portraits of Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush in the East Wing’s Booksellers’ Hall.
As for Melania, it’s unlikely that the current First Lady is sorry to see the East Wing go because she was hardly ever there.
In May, the New York Times calculated that Melania Trump had spent fewer than fourteen days at the White House since her husband’s second term began.
And in the case of Trump and his relationship with the White House, it does feel like there’s an agenda at play.
Photo by Tiago Rosado on Unsplash
More than the sum of their parts
The legacy of the First Ladies who have passed through those corridors is important.
Because here’s the thing. Public buildings add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
Every schoolkid or veteran who has walked through those doors left their mark.
The walls are painted with the souls of the people who passed by them.
Public buildings embody the history and belief systems of the people who live in their shadows.
Buildings like this evoke deep feelings — reverence, awe, wonder — that become ingrained in a place. They become deeply symbolic because human beings seek out places to invest with meaning. They’re the things that anchor us in place and time.
It’s in our DNA.
Imagine the pull of St. Paul’s Cathedral for a child living in the slums of 18th-century London. Or the power of the pyramids for a shepherd in Ptolemaic Egypt. And the awe that fishermen on the banks of the Yamuna River experienced in the shadows of the Taj Mahal, the monument Shah Jahan built in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
What would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower? Or Athens without the Parthenon? Or China without its Great Wall?
It’s the reason there’s an unholy rush to construct iconic wonders in places that were, until very recently, architectural wastelands — Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi.
They are constructing a past for the future out of concrete, steel and stone.
It’s always been the same. When the Vandal army was marching on Rome in 455AD, Pope Leo I convinced King Gaiseric to leave the city’s churches and palaces standing. He knew that the Roman people could recover from the loss of gold and silver. But if the city lost its potent symbols of faith and identity — the basilicas of St Peter, St Paul, and St John — then Rome as an idea would be lost.
Unfortunately, the 21st-century vandals know this. And they are not going to leave America’s fabric untouched.
“A Gut Punch”
For the men and women who worked there, the leveling of the East Wing is a “gut punch.”
As the bulldozers moved in, former East Wing staffers for First Lady Pat Nixon begged the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) to intervene and pause the demolition.
That was never going to work because the White House fired all the Biden appointees on the NCPC earlier this year. The new Commission head? A man named Will Scharf.
Scharf’s qualifications? He’s an attorney and White House staff secretary. Never know… maybe he’s an architecture fanboy in his spare time.
As for the members of the Commission of Fine Arts who oversee design elements of government projects, they were fired a week before the demolition at the White House began.
Coincidence? Seems unlikely.
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
“Death by a thousand papercuts.”
The undignified speed is for a good reason. As the Washington Post put it, “this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.”
And so it went ahead.
Four days later, all that remained was rubble.
“I don’t know where I can go to find the information. I can’t find any accessible drawings. I can’t find a permit,” said Democrat Rep. Bennie G. Thompson. “And then I see a bulldozer tearing down the east side of the White House.”
As the dust settles, millions of people around the world are asking the same question.
How the fuck did this happen?
A human wrecking ball
Donald Trump’s signature move is to stomp rough-shod over norms and human decency.
He is a wrecking ball in human form who leaves out the “forgiveness” part of the “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission” equation.
He has form, as any New Yorker can tell you. His destruction of a historically significant frieze from the façade of the Bonwit Teller building, despite promising it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, earned him the lasting scorn of his fellow New Yorkers.
And the unfortunate fact is that thanks to the odd status the president has in the American political system, Trump does appear to have the right to do what he likes with the White House.
As he described it to a group of wealthy donors at a recent dinner arranged to pass around the begging bowl to fund the project: “I said, ‘How long would the process take?’ Because I’m so used to zoning. They said, ‘Sir, you can start tonight…. You have zero zoning conditions, you’re the president.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.”
Presidential power has largely been constrained by respect for the office, and adherence to a system of norms and standards.
Trump and the people around him have shown that they have none of those things.
Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash
Presidential makeovers
It’s not the first time the White House has had a presidential makeover.
But it is the first time it’s been done like this.
Taft built the first Oval Office in 1909. Teddy Roosevelt knocked down greenhouses to build the West Wing. FDR relocated the Oval Office to its present location for more privacy and installed an indoor swimming pool for his polio therapy (yes, kids, that’s why we have vaccinations. Polio is bad.) Nixon turned the swimming pool into a press briefing room. And Jimmy Carter installed a solar water system, bless him.
The biggest alteration was during Truman’s time behind the Resolute Desk. When a floor fell in beneath his daughter’s piano, an engineer told the president that the building’s interior was remaining in place “from force of habit.”
Truman gutted and rebuilt the interior but left the exterior of the White House largely untouched, other than the addition of the balcony that now bears his name.
Because they understood the symbolic and historic importance of the building, those presidents sought the advice of heritage experts. But they chose to do it. They were under no obligation to do so.
Given its prominence as a public building, it’s staggering to learn that the White House is exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires an impact assessment for the alteration of historic buildings.
The usual way of thinking is that the president of the United States of America doesn’t own the White House. The president is a temporary resident in a building owned by the people of America who voted to put him (and, one day, her) there.
But as far as Donald Trump is concerned, he’s completely justified in doing this. It’s just the latest in what the White House is now saying is a “history of improvements and additions from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”
Was Donald Trump allowed to demolish the East Wing? By the letter of the law, quite possibly yes. Although I imagine that will be challenged in years to come.
But remember what your mum always said?
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
How big is your ballroom?
Part of the issue is what’s replacing the East Wing: a presumably Trump-branded ballroom that, at the size of two American football fields, will be nearly double the size of the White House and accommodate 999 people. Why 999 rather than 1000? No fucking idea. Probably something numerological.
He calls it “a great legacy project.”
Trump’s many critics were, and are, aghast at his plans. Or, as the White House put it: “Unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.”
The Washington Post editorial board came out batting for the President’s grandiose plans for his temple to the new Gilded Age.
According to the Post, Trump is a “lifelong builder boldly pursuing a grand vision, a change agent unafraid to decisively take on the status quo and a developer slashing through red tape that would stymie any normal politician…. The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification.”
The ballroom is projected to cost US$300 million. Funds have poured in from private donors including Apple, Comcast, and Lockheed Martin.
Yeah.
But no matter where the money comes from, erecting a US$300 million vanity project while in the middle of a government shutdown isn’t a good look.
Show me the money
When the money’s flowing and the economy’s in the black, architecture is often at its best.
But in America today, that’s all smoke and mirrors. Despite Trump’s, well, trumpeting, the American economy is tanking. So, he’s making much of the fact he’s funding the ballroom himself.
It’s one of the very many things about this process that’s causing Americans concern.
Quid pro quo means ‘this for that.’ It’s Latin for ‘no free lunch.’
Donations on this scale don’t come without strings attached.
Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash
Liberace’s garage sale
Anyone who’s watched with horror as Trump transforms the Oval Office can confirm that even if his ballroom costs his donors a bomb, it will still end up looking cheap.
Before Trump Mk 2, the Oval Office was an exercise in restraint.
Now it looks like it’s been outfitted from Liberace’s garage sale with some help from a five-year-old crafter set loose with cans of gold spray paint, Costco bargain-bin decals, and a hot-glue gun.
The reason it looks so appalling is that the White House is scaled to project modesty and elegance. It doesn’t sit comfortably with the tizzy gold flourishes that have become a signature of dictator chic.
From beyond the grave, even Saddam and Gaddafi want to have a quiet word with whoever’s calling the shots, because it’s too much even for them.
But that’s all – hopefully – reversible.
What Trump’s done to the East Wing is not.
Like it or not, what he plans to put there will be remain for a long time.
And if the Oval Office is anything to go by, that’s a concern.
Photo by Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash
The Sun King
Trump loves a big ballroom.
When he built the 20,000-square-foot Donald J. Trump Grand (yes, Grand) Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago for his wedding to Melania, it cost him $40 million. It was modelled, of course, on Versailles.
The comparison is apt in a whole lot of ways other than a Fort Worth’s worth of gold leaf, and more crystal than a Swarovski factory outlet.
Louis XIV built Versailles as a reflection of his absolute power over the French people.
The so-called Sun King was known for the extravagance and excess of his reign. He believed in the same Divine Right of Kings that lost the British King his head in 1649. It basically meant he believed he was chosen by God and could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
When Louis established an absolute monarchy, unpicked the independence of the French nobility, and grabbed all the power for himself, he laid the foundations of the French Revolution.
Sound familiar?
No wonder Trump’s a fanboy.
New money
“Louis Quatorze” style, as it’s called, is a favourite of those looking to make a splash.
Gold means success; the more of it, the better.
So, the renderings and plans drawn up by McCrery Architects that Trump has been flapping about the place haven’t done much to allay anyone’s concerns about what he’s building.
It looks like a function room from Trump’s heyday in the 1980s. I don’t mean that in a good way. “Greed is good.” Remember that?
It’s as “new money” as you can get.
Trump would have found a kindred spirit in the ambitious 19th-century socialite, Alva Vanderbilt.
At her “summer house” on Rhode Island, she spent the equivalent today of US$380 million on renovations, including a gold ballroom inspired by — you guessed it — Versailles, complete with 22-karat gold leaf ornamentation and portraits of Louis XIV.
But gross expressions of wealth like this fly in the face of America’s founding principles. Even the most successful colonial Americans rejected the trappings of royalty.
When America fought for its independence and booted out the British monarchy, the idea wasn’t to set up one of its own.
Photo by Saad Ahmad on Unsplash
No Kings in built form
The White House cornerstone was laid in October 1792. George Washington picked the spot himself.
He had a very clear idea of the type of house the American president should live in. It should reflect the foundational concepts of the American nation.
A government by the people, for the people.
It would be modest and restrained.
Irish-born architect James Hoban went with Palladian neoclassicism. It was chosen because it revived the spirit of the Roman Republic.
The idea was to evoke the refined simplicity of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Neoclassicism was inspired by the 18th-century excavations at Pompeii, and the renewed interest in classical civilisations inspired by European aristocrats visiting ancient cities.
It was a reaction against the flourishes and excess of the Baroque and Rococo styles; the preferred architecture of kings and potentates (yes, like Louis XIV at Versailles).
Photo by Suzy Brooks on Unsplash
“A real dump.”
So, it’s no wonder that when he arrived at the White House for his first term, Trump declared it a “real dump.”
For that, read: not enough gold.
Trump didn’t understand that the point of the White House isn’t to dazzle the world into submission. It’s to project power through quiet restraint and confidence.
With the former comes fear.
With the latter, awe and respect.
No surprises which door Trump has chosen to go through.
George Washington, Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash
Burn it all down
George Washington wanted to embody the hopes and ambitions of the new American republic in the building first known as the Executive Mansion.
That word is important. ‘Executive.’ From the Latin, exsequi, meaning ‘to carry out.’ In English, it came to mean ‘a person with administrative and supervisory authority.’
Not a king.
Not an emperor.
An administrator.
That’s why the built form of the White House is so important. Because significant architecture is all about symbolism. It’s about the messages it sends.
Tearing it down sends another message altogether.
Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
A pissing competition
The demolition of the East Wing is not the first attack on the fabric of the White House.
In 1814, when Britain and America were squabbling over Canada, British troops entered Washington and burnt down the People’s House in retaliation for an American attack on Ontario.
The British understood how potent it is to destroy a monument that occupies an important place in a population’s psyche.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a pissing competition. And it’s been going on for as long as human beings have had places to call their own.
It’s why English and French forces burnt down China’s Old Summer Palace in 1860. The famed Library of Alexandria suffered the same fate at the hands of Christian reactionaries seeking to destroy “pagan” knowledge in the 3rd century AD. It’s also why the Romans destroyed the second temple of Jerusalem: to punish Jewish rebels.
Al Qaeda knew the same thing when it targeted the Twin Towers. The World Trade Centre wasn’t just one of the tallest buildings in the world. It was America’s monument to capitalism.
When it crumbled to dust, they were hitting America where it hurt.
Photo by The Now Time on Unsplash
Trump’s way or the highway
The point isn’t whether or not the White House needs a ballroom.
The point is the way it’s been handled.
Without consultation. And without warning.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise.
As in every other aspect of his life, it’s Trump’s way or the highway.
The timing is also suspicious. It swung attention away from dirty laundry the administration would rather not have people talking about: the history-making No Kings march; the attacks on alleged drug boats condemned by the UN human rights chief as illegal; the US$20 billion “lifeline” to Argentina ; the construction of more ICE detention centres; the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that’s looking more and more like the ceasefire you have when you’re not having a ceasefire; and, of course, the biggest elephant in the room: the government shutdown. Oh, and the Epstein files.
It didn’t have to be like this.
As Jill Biden’s former press secretary, Michael LaRosa put it: “every president and first lady in history has left their footprint on the White House in one way or another and all of them are entitled to do that. That’s what is so great about our history and our democratic system. All first families can play a role in evolving and growing the physical infrastructure of the president and first lady’s home … It’s not a symbol of a movement rather than a symbol of a democratic system and institution that still works 249 years later.”
Yet, here we are.
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