Amid the rubble and rancor memorializing where the East Wing of the White House once stood, President Donald Trump and his team are trying to dig out. Public outrage has been piling up over the sudden demolition to make way for the sprawling, golden ballroom he has long craved. Trump says the new construction will be a monument to the country’s greatness, even as his team insists there is nothing unusual in how he is going about it.
“Nearly every single president who has lived in this beautiful White House … has made modernizations and renovations of their own,” insists White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Author Kate Andersen Brower, who has written extensively about The People’s House, agrees with that foundational claim, but also points out a big difference this time: “We have never seen a wrecking ball taken to an entire wing.”
Never mind that Trump has dismissed the East Wing as “a very small building” that was “never thought of as being much.” Brower and plenty of others saw it as a treasure. “I certainly had a lot of reverence for it because it was the first lady’s domain. It’s the only place she has to really call her own,” she said.
Initially a carriage entrance during the term of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, it became the modern East Wing as millions of tourists see it each year — or did — under his distant cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt some 40 years later. The build-out was a practical matter: With World War II raging, an emergency underground bunker had been constructed on the spot and needed the building to hide it.
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