Construction on Donald Trump’s controversial new White House addition is off to a disastrous start if his model of the glitzy East Wing ballroom is anything to go by.
Plans shared by the MAGA administration suggest “a hurried process,” the New York Times reports, noting that a miniature mock-up of the 90,000 square foot annex, proudly unveiled to the press Wednesday, featured some truly bizarre architectural features.
These include a staircase leading up from the South Lawn directly into a brick wall, and at least two woefully misaligned windows that appear to open out onto one another.
Demolition of the existing structure, which began Monday, has prompted fierce outcry as cranes and backhoes were seen tearing down sections of exterior cladding and ripping windows off their hinges at one of the most instantly recognizable historic sites on the planet, with the scale of destruction now even visible from space.
The White House can’t seem to decide how many guests the new ballroom will accommodate, with official estimates ranging from 650 to 1,350 people. Once Trump has flattened the old East Wing, he has toyed with naming the $300 million new venue after himself.
Though the plans were first announced months ago, backlash to the actual start of construction has been swift. Critics, like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, have lamented what they describe as the president treating the physical structure of the nation’s highest office as if it was his own personal backyard.
“To take literally a wrecking ball to the White House… it’s grotesque, just grotesque!” the Morning Joe host said Tuesday. “It’s not yours! You rent it from the American people for four years.”
Others have compared the Trump administration’s work on the building, which the president had previously promised would leave the existing structures untouched, to ISIS’s desecration of historic sites and artifacts during the terrorist group’s brutal reign across parts of Syria and Iraq.
“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,” archaeologist Matthew Vincent, who spent two decades documenting the recovery of artifacts looted by the Islamic extremist movement, told the Daily Beast.
“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,” he added.
The NYT says Trump has indeed failed to follow established procedure for renovations on White House grounds, bypassing the usual reviews from federal groups like the National Capital Planning Commission.
Many have blasted the president’s neoclassical designs for reeking of megalomania, particularly given the sheer extent to which the new space will dwarf the existing site, which will have more than doubled by the time construction is complete in 2029.
“My concern is that it really transitions the whole thing into a presidential palace,” Edward Lengel, former chief historian of the White House Historical Society, told NPR. “That in some ways contradicts the original concept of the White House that the founders intended. [The building] is supposed to represent … a democratic symbol in a common democratic community.”
The president has previously referred to himself as “The Builder President,” in a nod to his career in real estate that also recalls similar, self-assigned monikers used by Soviet despot Joseph Stalin and North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Sung. But the lack of public disclosure on building plans has also raised alarm among some architects, who have voiced concern about whether the White House is planning to protect the adjoining structures from being weakened by the work.
Perhaps wary of the mounting backlash, Trump has ordered federal workers to refrain from taking and sharing photographs as construction progresses.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story, whose spokespeople have previously described the backlash to the work as exaggerated and unwarranted.
“Construction has always been a part of the evolution of the White House,” White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung wrote on X this week. “Losers who are quick to criticize need to stop their pearl clutching and understand the building needs to be modernized. Otherwise you’re just living in the past.”
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