There are so few shibboleths left in American life, and yet Donald Trump keeps finding more of them to demolish. In the case of the East Wing of the White House, literal demolition began on Monday as the President, without any warning, deployed a wrecking crew to tear down part of the protected landmark. Onlookers wondered whether the country has now entered the Twilight Zone.
The news of the White House desecration was first reported via Cat Zakrzewski, a Washington Post correspondent who happened to be on deck yesterday as the designated White House pool reporter.
“Part of the East Wing of the White House is being torn down today”, she wrote in one of the most jaw-dropping, pinch-me-it-can’t-be-true dispatches in US political history. “Some reporters have spotted the construction from a park near the Treasury Department this afternoon,” she announced.
Upon examination, her report turned out to be accurate. The East Wing of the White House, the preserve of successive First Ladies since its initial construction in 1902, was indeed falling victim to Trump’s zeal to build a 90,000 square foot ballroom that he almost certainly intends to name after himself. (Melania Trump is unlikely to raise any objections since she never works there).
The facade of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on 20 October. The ballroom will reportedly cos $250 million (£187m) (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)Of course, the White House has been remodelled on many previous occasions. Richard Nixon famously had a bowling alley installed in 1973 (it’s still there, and lucky members of the public occasionally get to play on its lanes). Jimmy Carter placed solar panels on the building’s roof that were later ripped down by Ronald Reagan. The White House briefing room was built atop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s swimming pool. The pool itself is now a computer server room. And in the 1950s, Harry Truman engaged in the wholesale reconstruction of the building to save it from rot and literal collapse.
But never before has a section of the building been torn down at the whim of a sitting president and without the necessary consultation or permission.
An interior view of the planned ballroom (Photo: The White House)The National Capital Planning Commission, which is supposed to approve construction work and major renovations to government buildings in Washington DC, appears not to have completed a review of Trump’s plans. The President himself claimed earlier this year that the ballroom’s construction would not interfere with the existing structure. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building”, he told reporters in July. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went even further. “Nothing will be torn down,” she promised.
Now, Trump’s team dimiss objections to the actual teardown as “pearl-clutching”. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on social media that “construction has always been part of the evolution of the White House. Losers who are quick to criticise need to…understand the building needs to be modernised.”
As his contractors laid waste to the East Wing, Trump was metaphorically defecating on the long history of presidents and their families viewing themselves simply as temporary tenants at the White House. Over the weekend, he also embraced imagery showing him literally dropping excrement on the American public.
Trump holds a model of an arch monument during a ballroom fundraising dinner in the East Room at the White House last week (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters)As up to seven million people took to the streets to participate in Saturday’s “No Kings” protests across America, Trump disseminated an AI-created video that depicts him in a fighter jet emblazoned with the name “KING TRUMP”. To the Kenny Loggins theme from Top Gun (“Danger Zone”), the President is portrayed dropping payloads of human waste on the demonstrators, with mountains of faeces falling from the sky.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans engaged in a familiar shrug of the shoulders when asked about the President’s latest excesses. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, sought to portray him as a satirist. “You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who has ever used social media”, he claimed.
pic.twitter.com/4eb8BYsKyp
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 19, 2025“He is using satire to make a point,” Johnson continued, although when pressed by reporters he declined to express the particular “point” Trump’s AI-created video was trying to make.
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Lest anyone fears that Republican lawmakers have no standards, on one issue they have found a couple of vertebrae to stand up to Trump. The President’s selection of “Make America Great Again” loyalist Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel – a traditionally independent anti-corruption agency – has run into the buffers with Republicans urging that his name be withdrawn. It was revealed that Ingrassia had used a text chat to tell fellow Republicans that he has “a Nazi streak” and believes a national holiday celebrating the life of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs”.
Facing an uphill struggle to secure Senate confirmation, Ingrassia deployed his attorney to suggest the texts could have been “manipulated”. But he also argued that “even if they are authentic, they clearly read as…satirical humour”.
Suddenly, in a nation where satire has never been an especially strong suit, there appears to be limitless quantities of it about. Meanwhile, America tiptoes ever closer towards its own very particular “danger zone”.
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