IT was a breezy, bright and autumnal Wednesday in Washington – the perfect backdrop for a stroll to the White House to watch the swift demolition of the East Wing.
I heard it before I saw it: the thrum of construction equipment and a loud rat-tat-tat that could have been digging or drilling.
As I weaved through a group of schoolchildren posing for photographs in front of the main residence, I could see the arms of two excavators bobbing around, too tall to be hidden by the thick white fence erected around the fresh construction site.
Behind them, a cloud of dust obscured the clear air.
It wasn’t so long ago that President Donald Trump was promising his plan to build an 8,360sq m ballroom on the grounds “won’t interfere with the current building”.
In fact, my colleague Luke Broadwater reported that the entire wing, which is historically the domain of the First Lady, will be razed in the project.
Images of the demolition, which began on Oct 20 as a precursor to the construction of a US$300mil ballroom, have rocketed around the globe, swiftly becoming political fodder and a perfect Rorschach test for a deeply polarising presidency.
“This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on the social platform X, above a picture showing roof tiles and windowpanes cascading from the facade of the wing, having fallen victim to the excavators’ jaws. “Illegal, destructive, and not helping you.”
The project has left historians and architects deeply alarmed.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation urged officials to pause until it could go through the “legally required public review process”.
Earlier, Trump seemed to suggest to donors that “no approvals” were required for the project.
Trump’s allies insist that the images show a president shaking up Washington, just like he promised.
In a sign of awareness that they could not entirely ignore the criticism of the project, though, administration officials called the uproar “manufactured outrage” in a release that detailed other renovations on the building over the years.
“He’s the builder-in-chief,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said brightly on Fox News. “In large part, he was re-elected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things.”
Trump, ever the developer, has certainly spent a lot of time building things at the White House.
He paved over the lawn in the Rose Garden to create a patio. He has added gold filigree to the Oval Office and ornate chandeliers to the Cabinet Room, remaking the White House with an indelible imprint of Mar-a-Lago maximalism that is all but certain to outlast his presidency.
“Thank you for having us at your home,” John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, told Trump during a visit on Oct 21, even though the White House does not actually belong to him, while thanking him “for everything you’re doing to make this such a beautiful place”.
Trump is also, arguably, pretty good at tearing things down, like long-standing alliances – something the secretary-general of Nato sought to bolster in Washington – or the guardrails intended to hem in his impulses as he seeks revenge on his enemies.
“He seems to be upending all the norms that are associated with the presidency,” Matt Smith, a tourist from Lexington, North Carolina, observed after riding up to the White House on a Lime scooter.
Smith, an independent voter who did not back Trump, had hoped to spend his trip to Washington visiting Smithsonian art museums; with those museums closed by the government shutdown, he settled for this particular spectacle instead.
“This is him physically doing it to us,” Smith said, “just to show that he can.”
White House officials have repeatedly said that the ballroom will be paid for privately; Trump had hosted a private dinner for donors who may see a donation to the project as a way to curry favour with the president.
But one busted norm seemed to collide with another, as Trump suggested that he might use funds from a settlement with his own government to pay for the ballroom.
After my colleague Devlin Barrett reported that Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him US$230mil to compensate him for the federal investigations into him – a situation with no parallel in American history in which the officials reviewing Trump’s claims are his own allies – Trump said he might use those funds to pay for his ballroom.
“If I get money from our country, I’ll do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House while we restore the White House,” he said. “We’re doing a great job with the White House. As you know, the ballroom is under construction.”
The source of such compensation would typically be taxpayer dollars. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Already a subscriber? Log in
Get 20% OFF The Star Digital Access
Cancel anytime. Ad-free. Unlimited access with perks.
