Donald Trump has reduced the White House’s historic East Wing to nothing but mangled metal and rubble.
New photos from the scene capture the violent ferocity with which the president demolished the century-old building to carve space for his gigantic $300 million ballroom.
No piece of the original structure remains standing, even though Trump insisted in July that the ballroom would be “near” the East Wing, but “not touching it,” and that construction would not “interfere with the current building.”
Photographer Anna Moneymaker on Monday captured an excavator clearing gnarled steel skeletons from where the East Wing, which was originally built in 1902 and housed the Office of the First Lady, once stood.
Trump is apparently trucking the dirt from the demolition to create mounds at a public Washington D.C. golf course. A person familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that some of the White House dirt will be used for the mounds, while the rest will be used elsewhere.
In addition to the first lady’s office, Trump’s demolition job—now even visible from space—has erased the East Colonnade, the Family Theater, as well as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.
Archeologists, preservationists, Democrats, and those who used to roam the East Wing’s halls have expressed horror at the teardown, for which Trump bypassed the usual reviews from federal groups like the National Capital Planning Commission.
“This is just an example of the executive plowing ahead with a project that we all found out about right at the last minute. And then it was gone,” Jason Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday.
The former Georgia state senator said the demolition “would be heartbreaking” for his grandmother Rosalynn Carter, “because she always believed this was the people’s house.”
Carter’s sentiment was echoed by Pete Souza, former Chief Official White House Photographer for Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
“You don‘t just tear down a building. This is not his house. This house belongs to us. It‘s the people’s house and one man should not be able to just knock down a building for his vanity ballroom project,” Souza told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
However, Trump has dismissed the backlash, calling the sound of the East Wing’s destruction “music to my ears,” and saying, “It was never thought of as being much. It was a very small building.”
In its place, the 79-year-old former real estate developer is building a 90,000 square-foot ballroom that will dwarf the White House’s iconic Executive Residence. He insists his project would be paid “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”
However, plans for the ballroom shared by the Trump administration include eyebrow-raising architectural features. A staircase leading up from the South Lawn runs directly into a brick wall, and at least two woefully misaligned windows appear to open out onto one another.
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