The facade of the East Wing of the White House came crumbling down on Monday as construction began on President Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a project that will transform one of the most recognizable buildings in the world and nearly double the size of the existing structure.
This president has not just changed so much about the way Washington works — he has changed the way Washington looks.
The East Wing seemed almost like it was the last inch of real estate on the White House complex he hadn’t started to make over in his own image. The Oval Office is dripping in gold and so is the Cabinet Room. The Rose Garden looks like Mar-a-Lago. There are massive flag poles in the backyard and in the front, and he’s been tweaking the White House residence upstairs, too. He’s directing renovations at the Kennedy Center right now, and he wants an Arc de Triomphe-style arch built on the other side of the Potomac.
There’s no telling just what this town might look like by the end of this term. But there will sure be a lot more to look at.
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.
The visuals of Monday’s East Wing demolition made clear just how dramatic an undertaking this will be. It constitutes 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.
Mr. Trump originally said back in July that the construction of his ballroom, at a cost of more than $200 million, “won’t interfere with the current building,” but that always seemed unrealistic given how big the plans were. On Monday, he said it would be able to hold “999” people.
Last week, he held a dinner at the White House with dozens of corporate executives who agreed to help finance the ballroom’s construction. The money pouring in for it has sparked concerns from ethics experts who warn that it is just the latest way for the wealthy to buy access to the president. And what sorts of things might the ballroom actually be used to do, for a crypto billionaire president who has thrown dinners with his wealthiest memecoin holders?
“For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post on Monday.
He added that “the East Wing is being fully modernized as part of this process, and will be more beautiful than ever when it is complete!”
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 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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