The demolition is part of Trump’s planned construction of the White House State Ballroom, a gaudy 90,000-square-foot complex that will replace the East Wing. That space once held offices for the First Lady’s staff, various other White House support personnel, and a guest entrance. Now it will feature a ballroom that fits 650 seated guests for Trump to fete and be feted by.
Trump’s building project is more or less illegal. The White House is both public property and a national historical site. Its welfare is overseen by the National Park Service and any structural changes must be approved by the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, which oversees federal public buildings in the nation’s capital more generally. Federal law requires the commission to approve plans for all federal buildings in the district, including the White House, in what can be a years-long process of consultation and review.
“Given the president’s history as a builder, and given the plans that we’ve seen publicly, I think this will be a tremendous addition to the White House complex, a sorely needed addition,” Scharf reportedly said at the meeting, with the usual mix of obsequiousness and pricklishness that Trump appointees use when talking to the public. “I think any assertion that this commission should have been consulted earlier than it has been, or it will be, is simply false.”
A casual observer of the news might ask, “Hey, how is this happening while the government is shut down?” Trump circumvented Congress on funding by soliciting $200 billion in private donations instead. This was not a circumstance where millions of hard-working Americans spared a few bucks for a collection drive, either. Trump took in donations from his wealthy friends and allies, as well as major corporations with business before the administration.
The prospect of killing innocent civilians did not seem to bother the president or those in attendance. “In fact, nobody wants to go fishing anymore,” Trump told laughing guests, according to The New York Times. “No one wants to do anything near the water. They might have a beautiful boat and they might as well get rid of their boat because they’re very nervous.”
In past administrations, this may have been cause for concern—and fodder for media outrage. Not so under Trump. The president has spent the last year ignoring black-letter federal law whenever it suits him, raising and spending federal funds without congressional permission, and treating the federal government as a personal extension of his private self. Trump staffed the Justice Department with his former defense lawyers and has now demanded $230 million in compensation for past investigations and prosecutions. Illegality and corruption are the standard, not the deviation, for this administration.
Nor is the Trump administration incorrect to note that the White House has undergone significant renovations over the years. Roosevelt installed a swimming pool during his tenure. Harry Truman added a balcony on the second floor’s south face. Richard Nixon replaced part of a basement with a bowling alley. Barack Obama added a basketball court. These features tended to be additions instead of subtractions; with the exception of the balcony, they were also only semi-permanent features.
Trump has departed from these practices and principles to convert the White House into a personal palace of sorts. Shortly after his return, he paved over Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden outside the West Wing to create a patio space resembling the ones at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The “Rose Garden Club,” as the administration now terms it, is an entertaining space where government officials, private citizens, and other favored supplicants and courtiers can be fed and entertained by the White House staff alongside Trump. (For those keeping track, that means Trump is adding two event spaces to a mansion that already had plenty of them.)
The symbolic message is inescapable. Trump appears to think that he acquired the federal government in a hostile takeover on Election Night last year and that he is now the Boss of America. Public property like the White House is now part of his private portfolio. The federal civil service, stripped of for-cause firing protections and nonpartisanship guidelines, is functionally indistinguishable from the at-will employees of the Trump Organization.
Presidents and White House personnel knew for decades that the building was aging poorly. After Reynolds’s testimony, Truman commissioned a more extensive survey that found the building was in danger of imminent collapse. In the winter of 1948, the president announced that he would be vacating the executive mansion for a few years so that it could be completely rebuilt from the inside out.
Public buildings, after all, tend to reflect and represent a nation’s values and ideals. Many of Washington’s most prominent buildings are in the neoclassical style to evoke Greco-Roman democratic virtues instead of the aristocratic and monarchical aesthetics of European royal residences—or the gaudy, golden spaces occupied by preening dictatorships. The Capitol’s austere marble and the White House’s blank masonry are in sharp republican contrast to the gilded splendor of Versailles or Buckingham Palace.
For now, Trump’s priority is the ballroom he’s long demanded. In a sense, I can’t really blame him. It would be the perfect monument to his presidency. Nothing else could capture his arrogant sense of personal ownership over public goods and services, his blithe disregard for legal and procedural constraints, his zealous encouragement of oligarchy, corruption, and personalist rule, his reckless desecration of national sites, his utter lack of basic American civic beliefs, and his self-absorbed priorities.
The good news is that the White House, for all its historical value and symbolic potency, is just a building. The next Democratic president can happily demolish whatever ballroom Trump manages to construct over it. The East Wing was built once before and can be rebuilt again. The patio that now covers the Rose Garden can be dug up, filled in with healthy soil, and replanted to bloom once more. If only our national values and institutions could be restored so easily.
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