The White House’s East Wing is gone. With its demise, President Donald Trump continues to rewrite history, including the traditions of how a US president can take a bulldozer to the “people’s house.”
For Trump, the East Wing had to be demolished to make way for a 90,000-square foot ballroom to host foreign dignitaries and 999 guests. It’s a massive $350 million project he said will be paid for by private donors.
The viral images of the demolition awakened intense emotions ranging from horror to celebration, and stirred questions of what this new White House means for everyday Americans.
“[There are] those that do see it representing prosperity; that certainly can be aspirational,” said Debbie Millman, designer and educator at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “But that’s not the status of most Americans.”
We spoke with Millman about Trump’s legacy of destroying historical artifacts and enraging the public. It’s a legacy that began with his father Fred Trump, and shares a throughline with the architectural visions of monarchs and dictators.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is your gut reaction to what you see happening at the White House right now?
Oh, my gut reaction is one of heartbreak. It’s really sad to see what’s happening, to see the demolition, to see this historic wing of the White House demolished. He’s essentially done this on his own without any input or counsel from preservationists or historians. He’s not gotten any, at all, to do something like this.
If you go to the White House website, they very craftily put up a historical list of other renovations that have occurred. But those were always done with the permission of historians, preservationists, architects that were quite open about what was being done, with blueprints and so forth. And so it’s a little bit of a game of hide and seek here, where there seems to be an openness to what’s being done. But it’s really smoke and mirrors. There are no floor plans that have been shared. There’s a couple of nondescript drawings that have been shared, but [they] don’t in any way feature what’s happening on the inside of the building more than just a footprint.
President Trump is not known for his restraint. Right? He likes things big, he likes them gold. He likes things that some people might call tacky or gaudy.
If you look at what Americans are saying about this remodel, some people see those visual choices as representative of prosperity, as representative of success. Like one man’s tacky is another man’s “Hey, that’s gorgeous.” Is there an argument here that the “people’s house” should reflect the guy that the people elected, because that reflects us as well?
The answer to that is very much about what you believe to be true about representation. Those that do see it representing prosperity — that certainly can be aspirational, but that’s not the status of most Americans. This is the “people’s house.” It’s not one person’s house. And what Mr. Trump is doing is creating a castle or a palace.
President Trump has long treated architecture as his tool of identity, as has his father in 1966. [Fred Trump] tore down a 19th-century amusement park in Coney Island and promised that he would preserve some of the historical elements, but they didn’t. Instead they threw a party at the demo site. Believe it or not, there were bikini-clad, hard-hat wearing models, and Fred Trump handed out bricks for people to throw at the glass front of the historic pavilion there, to dismantle and destroy it, as opposed to preserve it for historical purposes.
And then [Donald] Trump followed suit in 1980; he demolished the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue to be able to make way for Trump Tower, and he promised the limestone art deco reliefs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he destroyed them. And when asked about that later, he shrugged his shoulders and provided a sense of disdain for them as opposed to respect. This is not something that he hasn’t done before. And it shows a lack of respect for history. It shows a lack of respect for preserving artifacts that have value and meaning to create something that is benefiting only really himself.
I don’t know much about the history of the White House, but I have to assume that President Trump isn’t the first president to kind of tinker with the place. I mean, these are generally men with big egos who see themselves as big leaders. What’s been done in the past, and is what Trump is doing that much different?
Well, the new ballroom is estimated at 90,000 square feet. It is not the first intervention in the White House by a long shot. Thomas Jefferson expanded the grounds. He created gardens that reflected his ideals. Franklin Roosevelt relocated the Oval Office to the southeast corner of the West Wing, but at the time, the existing office was rather dark, rather cramped, and so he brought a lot of light and accessibility to the office. Harry Truman oversaw the reconstruction of the interior,
But a lot of that was because of what seemed to be imminent collapse of parts of the building that were so unsafe that there was really no other recourse but to do that. Of course, Jacqueline Kennedy — her restoration project in general emphasized historical continuity. She also obviously created the Rose Garden. She did a lot to the grounds, all of which had been demolished. [Editor’s note: In July, Trump paved over the Rose Garden to create a tiled patio.]
So this is not the first destruction of pieces of the White House that Trump wants to remake as a zone for primarily celebratory or party reasons, as opposed to [for] reasons that reflect more safety or preservation or augmentation for the people, as opposed to [for] billionaire donors.
All right, so other presidents have changed the White House, but you’re saying this sort of belies comparison. If there’s no real comparison in the US, are there comparisons elsewhere, other world leaders who have done this sort of thing?
Oh my gosh, yes. Louis XIV’s decision for the design of Versailles transformed what was a royal residence into a stage on which his reign would be essentially performed. And Benito Mussolini’s marble piazzas sought to tie fascism to Rome’s magnificence. And in the process, entire neighborhoods were demolished to create the boulevards of the Imperiali.
In Versailles and fascist Rome, architecture was created to extend the power of a leader by rewriting the meaning of the nation’s most visible symbols. And essentially, that is what Trump is doing here. It’s not a practical addition; it’s a metaphor for the Trump brand overtaking the institution.
Now, there’s no question that there will be value to a ballroom. The current ballroom holds, I think, about 250 people. When the White House has hosted bigger parties, they’ve had to erect tents on the grounds. And that was not always a feasible or comfortable situation. If it was raining, people had to walk on plastic. But that doesn’t mean we need to have the over-the-top showpiece that does not reflect the soul of this country. The soul of this country is not gilded flourishes; it’s just not.
You are an expert in your field. And President Trump has done this thing in America that’s very interesting: He’s cast a lot of doubt on experts in favor of regular people, ordinary folk. And I think what he might say is, “I was democratically elected by the ordinary folk. I have those regular people on my side, and if I choose to remake the White House in my image or the image of something else, that’s what ordinary Americans voted for.”
Madam Expert, what do you think about that argument?
Well, this is not a reflection of or for the people. The ballroom will rescript the White House as an extension of the Trump brand. And the fact that this has been funded by and hosted for billionaires in exchange for recognition of their own brands as part of this really refutes that statement.
In my opinion, one of the great tenets of a brand is: Can you remove the logo and still identify what it is? Do these iconic assets speak to you beyond the name of the brand? And the current building will be reshaped in the image of President Trump. It will be defined by over-the-top opulence — truly exaggerated and cumbersome scale. And it’s a preference. It shows a preference for size over substance, and size over subtlety, and size over dignity. It will challenge the integrity of the existing architecture of the White House in ways we can’t even envision yet. And I think it’s converting what is considered to be, and has always been considered to be and described as, “the house of the people” into a stage for Trump’s personal aggrandizement.
