A real-life Indiana Jones likened Donald Trump’s “authoritarian” White House destruction to the cultural vandalism once committed by ISIS.
Trump began tearing into the East Wing this week to clear space for his gaudy $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom, despite having vowed to leave the historic structure untouched.
“You can start tonight, you have no approvals,” the 79-year-old previously boasted of the project, ordering large sections of the Roosevelt-era building to be torn down, while calling the sound of wrecking “music to my ears.”
With the part of the Executive Mansion which has hosted key historic moments and popular public tours now set to vanish for good, archaeologist Matthew Vincent—who is originally from Seattle, Washington, and is program director at the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Jordan—told the Daily Beast that Trump was showing a “horrific” disregard for U.S. heritage.
Vincent has spent two decades documenting the recovery of ancient artifacts looted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq—similar to movie character Indiana Jones, a globe-trotting American archaeologist-professor who hunts down lost antiquities before tyrants and thieves can exploit them.
He said the president’s obsession with rebuilding the residence in his own image echoes the tyrannical destruction he’s witnessed overseas.
“The first reaction I had was, what the f—? It’s not OK. The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump—it’s a federal building, a taxpayer building, belonging to the American people,” said Vincent.
“What he’s doing is horrific and done without any oversight or acknowledgment from the bodies that should oversee this—and certainly not with the American people.”
“Behind this is an ideology—to disregard the past and those who came before it: ‘If we don’t like something, we erase it. Party lines matter more than history. We’ll erase the past to paint one side of a story’—and that’s just what ISIS did,” Vincent said.
In the mid-2010s, ISIS carried out a campaign of cultural vandalism to impose its ideology, intimidate populations, and rewrite history. Militants dynamited ancient cities and shrines, smashed artifacts in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, and bulldozed tombs and libraries they branded “idolatrous.”
The destruction by ISIS militants, says Vincent, served multiple goals, including ideological purification, terroristic spectacle for propaganda, erasure of pre-Islamic and minority heritage, as well as profit—since looters working alongside the group trafficked portable antiquities on the black market while larger, immovable monuments were filmed being obliterated.
The result was a deliberate assault on cultural memory with the intention of narrowing the story a society can tell about itself, Vincent explained, warning that tearing out storied spaces in the White House in order to install a gaudy showpiece echoes that playbook used by ISIS extremists to rewrite the past.
“It’s two sides of the same coin,” he said. “Ideologically driven people are burning down the past to present one side of the picture and remove the story of the other side.”
Vincent argues that dismantling such iconic settings—which he said started with the paving over of the Rose Garden in favour of a Mar-a-Lago-style terrace—erases the public’s memory.
“Never again will we hear a reporter say they are in the Rose Garden. It will always now be what Trump wanted to paint—without permission from the American people,” Vincent said.
Despite the outrage, the administration has waved off critics, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissing anger as performative, and trying to cast the ballroom as a routine upgrade.
But D.C. preservation experts say bypassing guardrails undermines the capital’s planning regime, with the White House pushing ahead while skirting review requirements.
Vincent, who has worked in Jordanian archaeology since 2004 and now co-leads ACOR’s National Inventory Project, said Americans should be doing all they can to protest against what Trump is doing without their consent.
“The checks and balances that have been part of the government are gone now, and it reveals a much deeper problem in the U.S. and the ideologies there,” said Vincent.
“The way of working in the U.S. isn’t that people will storm the Capitol to save the East Wing, but they should be clamoring for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. It is not OK.
“Sadly enough, this is probably the least of it—look at ICE and how immigrants are being treated. Their open-handed ability to arrest without due process—this is not the United States we know and love.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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