President Trump is far from the first president to put his mark on the White House, a building that has been changing almost since the day it opened in 1800.
Thomas Jefferson added a wine cellar, and James Monroe and Andrew Jackson put on porticos. Theodore Roosevelt erected the West Wing; Richard Nixon added a bowling alley; and Barack Obama adapted a tennis court to create a place to play hoops. Franklin D. Roosevelt put in a pool.
Yet for all of that, the images this week of the East Wing’s tear-down have still been jarring, as Mr. Trump began construction on a $300 million ballroom that he promised would be big, beautiful and “privately funded by many generous Patriots.”
“Every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc.,” the president posted on Truth Social on Monday, adding, “This Ballroom will be happily used for Generations to come!”
Mr. Trump’s second-term overhaul of the White House already ranks among its most extensive, as the president has forcefully exerted his executive — and aesthetic — privilege on the Oval Office, the Rose Garden and other spaces.
Experts place the makeover beyond anything since the Kennedys’ Camelot era — when the Rose Garden, now covered in stone slabs, was renewed — or even further back, to Harry S. Truman’s tenure, when he basically saved the White House from collapsing in on itself.
But no one has seemingly been more determined to put his stamp on “The People’s House,” as it’s known, said Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and the author of “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.”
“Nobody has tried to reshape the White House into their happy place like what he’s doing,” she said.
The White House has defended the changes as part of a long tradition of presidential upgrades. But the demolition work has also led to the awkward optics of the president tearing down a singular symbol of American democracy, something that has inspired a furious outcry, including from some who lived there in the past.
“It’s not his house. It’s your house,” wrote Hillary Clinton on X. “And he’s destroying it.”
Experts on the White House say the president’s pad has, in fact, long needed more room for large events, including James A. Abbott, an author of “Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration and Its Legacy,” who said a large state dining room had been “needed for 60 years.”
“The White House has to evolve for the needs of the office,” Mr. Abbott said, noting that other presidential administrations had groused that the White House’s capacity for state dinners was limited by space. The Obamas, for instance, used tents for some occasions, and the Kennedys divided guests up into separate rooms.
And while Mr. Abbott said he did not agree with the Trumps’ politics, or the planned location of the new ballroom, he defended the right to build it.
“Do not blame the Trumps,” he said. “What they’re trying to do is make sure the accommodations fulfill the need.”
Mr. Trump has offered practical justifications for some other changes to the premises, saying, for instance, that one of his reasons for placing slabs over the Rose Garden was that the grass footing was difficult to navigate for women in heels.
Still, reviews of the ballroom’s plans, and its splashy interior, have been decidedly mixed.
“It looks like the Bellagio without the craps tables,” said Robert Klara, the author of “The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence.”
Architectural historians have expressed “grave concern” about the project, while others have noted that the construction does not have the approval of the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees government buildings in Washington. On Tuesday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation urged a pause for the “legally required public review process.”
The demolition also seemingly contradicts the president’s own pledge that it would not “interfere with the current building.”
And with the government still shut down and many people still struggling, the ballroom construction has also been sharply criticized in economic terms.
“Oh you’re trying to say the cost of living is skyrocketing?” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on X. “Donald Trump can’t hear you over the sound of bulldozers demolishing a wing of the White House.”
None of which seems to bother a president who continues to challenge institutional norms, a position amplified by his backers.
“Losers who are quick to criticize need to stop their pearl clutching and understand the building needs to be modernized,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, in a post on X. “Otherwise you’re just living in the past.”
Mr. Trump is not the only president who has been criticized for extravagance or the cost of upgrades. According to the White House Historical Association, Mr. Jefferson — ever the sophisticate — took some heat for adding pricey colonnades; Andrew Jackson’s addition of the North Portico, around 1829-30, was also viewed as problematic because of the economic downturn at the time. Even the East Wing — built out during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and now being gutted — was questioned because of its construction during wartime belt-tightening.
Experts in psychology and design say Mr. Trump’s motivations may lie in a mix of political and personal preferences, like his obsession with gold, including branding his administration “a new Golden age.”
Glittering surroundings imply wealth, of course, and wealth implies power, social standing and sophistication. Rebecca Zorach, an art historian and co-author of “Gold: Nature and Culture,” noted that rulers had long used grandiose projects like Versailles to express “ephemeral displays” of political, spiritual and religious power.
Mr. Trump’s ample use of gilt might also have a strategic motive, said Sally Augustin, a psychologist who has studied the mental impact of design. “People are meant to be hyper-stimulated in that environment, which sort of puts them on their back foot,” she said.
The ballroom renovation has raised sinister speculation from some Democrats as well. “Who spends $200 million on a ballroom at their home and then leaves?” said Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, at a Politico event in late August.
The makeovers are not completely surprising considering the president’s background: a real estate mogul who has always loved a big project, building golf courses, hotels and skyscrapers all affixed with his name, though he has also had a series of projects fail and flop.
“I’m going to be building,” Mr. Trump recalled saying to an associate in “Art of the Deal,” his 1987 memoir, “when everyone else has gone bust.”
Even before construction began, Mr. Trump seemed excited by his latest project, spotted on the roof surveying the site.
“Nobody previously had any knowledge or experience in doing such things,” the president wrote in June, of building. “But I do.”
The White House, however, is a different type of project, already built and in no need of branding, a symbol of both government and an actual museum, as well as a residence whose tenants are — by dint of democracy and term limits — always just passing through.
Ms. Brower said Mr. Trump’s efforts had far outstripped those of his predecessors, noting, for instance, that while Ronald Reagan “had a lot of western paraphernalia — horse saddles and things like that.” But, “he wasn’t trying to recreate the White House into a horse ranch like his ranch in California,” she said. “Kennedy wasn’t trying to make it like Hyannis Port or Palm Beach.”
Not so for Mr. Trump, whose embrace of the South Florida sensibility extended into using striped yellow-and-white beach umbrellas — like those at Mar-a-Lago — on the Rose Garden, which he is calling the Rose Garden Club.
Krystine I. Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse who has written about the importance of home in human psychology, said renovations often came from the same place as big political and policy decisions: the urge to leave a legacy, particularly for people whose self-esteem is “wrapped up in their success in the world.”
She added: “Their need is greater to put their mark, in external ways, both in their public life and their personal lives.”
Mr. Klara, a critic of the ballroom’s design, said that with other presidential changes, there was not a sense that “they wanted people to look at those additions and think of them.”
Mr. Trump’s changes, though, seemed different.
“There’s a self-aggrandizement to the scale that, to me, seems more about the builder than the building,” he said.
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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