Construction workers ripped the face off the East Wing on Monday as construction of President Trump’s $250 million (or so he estimates) ballroom entered its next phase.
By late afternoon, reporters hanging out in a park near the Treasury Department could see a glimpse of the renovation in progress as the long arm of a track excavator reached up and tore the walls clean off the building. Crews of workmen wandered around as detritus — window panes, building blocks and wires — piled up.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the White House, Mr. Trump was meeting with a collegiate baseball championship team. “You know, we’re building right behind us, we’re building a ballroom,” he told them.
“Right on the other side, you have a lot of construction going on,” he said, “which you might hear periodically.”
“It just started today,” he added.
News of the demolition was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The East Wing is the side of the White House that has historically been the domain of the first lady. Early last month, some of Melania Trump’s staff began boxing up their belongings and moving into other parts of the White House complex in anticipation of the disruption ahead.
The plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom constitute one of the largest renovations to the building in decades. Not since President Harry S. Truman built out what became the West Wing has a construction project so big been undertaken on the White House grounds. On Monday, Mr. Trump said the ballroom would be able to hold “999” people.
He originally said back in July that the construction of his ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” but that always seemed unrealistic given how big the plans were.
The president has a long history of tearing things to the ground. He was, after all, a real estate developer.
In 1980, he ka-blammed the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan so that he could raise up Trump Tower. He promised to preserve the treasured limestone friezes atop the old building but then went and jackhammered them into oblivion, infuriating the city’s beau monde.
He went to the “21” Club with the Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner and asked her, “What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?”
She answered yes.
“Who cares?” he replied. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment …”
In 1966, his father, Fred Trump, tore down a 19th-century amusement park in Coney Island. Trump père threw a party at the demo site, complete with bikini-clad, hard-hat-wearing models. He handed out bricks for people to chuck at the glass front of the park’s pavilion, a beloved local attraction known as “Funny Face.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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