Ballroom build begun: It’s not just norms Trump’s bulldozing in Washington
The images are striking. Where part of the White House’s majestic East Wing once stood, now sits a demolition site – complete with construction equipment and debris, with the side of the building completely torn away.
In its place, if all goes as planned, will rise the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom announced by President Donald Trump in July, a grand event space that will dwarf the existing 55,000-square-foot executive mansion.
For Washingtonians and tourists alike, it’s a shocking sight. President Trump, after all, had said construction would not interfere with the current building. The new ballroom will be the largest structural change to the White House since the renovation and expansion of the East Wing in 1942.
Why we wrote this
President Trump’s new ballroom and proposed arch would be funded by private donors. But beyond the expenses, his modus operandi seems to be to go for it and deal with the consequences later.
On Tuesday morning, a day after the demolition began, a scrum of White House press photographers, equipped with ladders and telephoto lenses, gathered outside the fenced perimeter to capture what they could through trees and around other obstacles. The best photos come from the nearby Treasury Department, although employees have since been ordered to stop sharing them.
On Tuesday evening, the Washington Post reported that “much of the East Wing” had been destroyed, judging by a photo obtained by the newspaper. The East Wing includes the offices of the first lady, her staff, and the White House social secretary.
For Mr. Trump, a real estate developer by profession, the ballroom project is by far the greatest example of the merging of his public and private personas. Since his second inauguration in January, he has quickly added his own touch to his residence and workspace – adorning the Oval Office with gold filigree, paving the rose garden and transforming it into a private café, and adding 88-foot-tall flagpoles to the north and south lawns.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – of which Mr. Trump took over as president in February – is also getting a makeover, as is the bathroom in the White House’s famous Lincoln Room. No detail is too small, including the type of grass planted in the capital’s public spaces, even on roundabouts.
“I think I know more about grass than any human being in the world,” Mr. Trump, owner of many world-class golf courses, boasted during a meeting with U.S. Park Police officers in August.
Besides, no project is too big. The president announced plans to build a large arch — similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — on a traffic circle at the end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. At a dinner last week for donors contributing funds for the new ballroom, Mr. Trump showed a model of the planned arch, inevitably dubbed the “Trump Arch,” which he hopes to install by July 4 — the 250th anniversary of the founding of the nation.
The new arch would also be financed by private donors. Last week, some 130 people attended the East Wing’s dinner for ballroom sponsors, which included representatives from companies including Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon and Palantir Technologies, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With all these plans, Mr. Trump is demonstrating a distinctive characteristic of his second term: just go for it and see if anyone tries to stop him. During his first term, when he installed a new security fence and a 1,200-square-foot tennis pavilion on the White House grounds, the National Capital Planning Commission spent more than a year on the approval process for each. The NCPC is a federal agency that controls the construction and renovation of federal buildings.
This time, the NCPC was not involved — and did not need to be, according to White House Secretary of State Will Scharf, a key figure in Mr. Trump’s inner circle that the president named to head the NCPC. When President Harry Truman oversaw an extensive renovation of the White House, he got Congress to pass legislation creating a commission to handle the project.
In his previous career as a real estate developer, Mr. Trump prided himself on his “can do” approach. A chapter in his book “The Art of the Deal” describes how he took over New York City’s unsuccessful six-year effort to renovate the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, completing it in 3 1/2 months and under budget, and winning applause from Mayor Ed Koch.
Today, the stakes are much higher, as Mr. Trump embarks on the biggest construction project of his two terms. The White House is not just a building, it is a symbol of the United States – and it is known as “the people’s house.”
The public reaction was fierce, as was the response from the White House on Tuesday afternoon.
“In the latest example of manufactured outrage, deranged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a privately financed grand ballroom to the White House,” the president’s communications team said in a lengthy statement that includes photos of White House renovations over the decades.
On Tuesday morning, as images of the gaping hole in the side of the East Wing proliferated across the Internet, a small crowd of locals and tourists from around the world gathered to check it out.
One man, an employee of a local university, called the ballroom project an expression of “Trump’s ego.” Another, who came from Lebanon after running the Chicago marathon, asked to have his photo taken in front of the Treasury building, with the neighboring construction partly visible. A family from the United Kingdom seemed intrigued by the spectacle, as jackhammers rang out.
One day, the new White House ballroom, which seats 650 people — or even 999 people, as Mr. Trump now says — might seem completely normal. But for now, this is another defining moment for the Trump era.
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