It’s so on the nose it veers into the cliche. A bulldozer crashing its way through the walls of the White House’s East Wing, crunching over splintered timber, tangles of wires, rebar, drywall, and plaster. If the scene had been crafted in the Saturday Night Live writers room President Donald Trump would be driving the excavator himself. After all, the demolition is the traumatic birth of his brainchild: A $250 million ballroom modeled after the one at Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort; a glass and columned behemoth that historians and architects warn is being built with little regard for the historic character of the building, and outside the bounds of the law. Welcome to Mar-a-Lago on the National Mall, Trump’s Versailles in Washington.
“Historically, major White House renovations have been tightly scripted, bureaucratically overseen operations-never impulsive, never unilateral,” historian Alexis Coe tells Rolling Stone. “Today’s remodel deviates sharply from that norm. The East Wing demolition and planned [construction] are proceeding with minimal transparency, no visible [National Parks Service] public design review, and uncertain funding oversight.” Despite the gouging of the East Wing already being under way, the White House told Axios on Wednesday that it had not submitted its renovation plans to The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) — the body normally tasked with approving development plans for federally owned land and buildings. The commission — as well as other large swaths of the government — remain closed amidst the government shutdown, yet the president’s construction crews are moving at full tilt.
Between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, French Emperor Louis XIV spent millions of livres on the expansion of his Versailles hunting lodge into a sprawling palatial complex from which he could house — and supervise — the French aristocracy. Trump, who has compared his decorative style to the baroque masterpiece, seems to share a similar impulse. He christened his gaudy Mar-a-Lago estate the Southern White House, and spends a truly staggering amount of time in its confines despite the demands of his office, surrounded by all manner of GOP climbers. If the French king treated Versailles as the residential clubhouse for his courtiers and supplicants, the American president has his Palm Beach resort. Now, that same philosophy is being applied not to a Trump hotel, golf course, or casino, but the literal home of American political power.
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Since returning to the White House, Trump has embarked on a lengthy project to literally redesign the historic presidential residence in his own image. The oval office has been doused in gold decoration and Home Depot moulding with all the finesse of a preschool glitter glue craft hour. The West Colonnade has been outfitted with a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” exhibiting portraits of every American president save one: former President Joseph Biden, who Trump had replaced with a picture of an autopen.
The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over to create what can only be described as an attempted recreation of the terrace at Mar-a-Lago, sans pool and generally agreeable weather. The rose bushes have taken second stage to orange creamsicle sun shades where the conservative bloated and powerful dine al-fresco with their president.
Yet it was Trump’s most ambitious project that led us to the scene we witnessed this week, of a bulldozer on the White House grounds, providing the visceral visual reminder of the president’s unrestrained campaign to reshape national institutions in his own image. The renovations have been carried out under the same playbook of Trump’s governance: governing bodies have been ignored, approval processes forgone, and financial transparency done away with.
Last week, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) issued an open letter urging the administration to “follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process,” as befits a building of both historic and cultural importance.
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“While we recognize that the White House is a building with evolving needs […] the proposed ballroom will be the first major change to its exterior appearance in the last 83 years,” SAH wrote, emphasizing its support for recommendations for the project put forth by The American Institute of Architects (AIA).
The White House claims that the projects are being paid for by a mix of disclosed and undisclosed private donors. Some companies, including Alphabet, have agreed to dump millions into the project to settle frivolous lawsuits brought against them by Trump. Even so, the White House is not a private residence subject to the whims of an individual owner who can remodel the bathrooms at will. It is, as Coe describes it, a “living museum.” A historic property more akin to a luxurious long-term AirBnB for the president and his family — owned by the taxpayer, maintained by the National Parks Service — and thus subject to oversight.
In August, the AIA wrote its own letter reminding the president that “the White House is the ‘People’s House,’” and that while Trump “may have secured private funding, the White House is not a private building.”
“Any modifications to it — especially modifications of this magnitude — should reflect the importance, scale, and symbolic weight of the White House itself. So, too, must the process rise to the significance of the building and the extent of the proposed alterations,” they wrote.
So far the White House has thrown concerns and criticism under the treads of the president’s construction equipment, calling the pushback “the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies.”
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“For more than a century, U.S. Presidents have been renovating, expanding, and modernizing the White House to meet the needs of the present day,” the White House Press Office wrote in a public memo. “President Trump is carrying forward that legacy, breaking ground on a grand ballroom — a transformative addition that will significantly increase the White House’s capacity to host major functions honoring world leaders, foreign nations, and other dignitaries.”
But the problem was never the desire to modernize or build. “What truly distinguishes this project is its secrecy and personalization,” Coe says. “This project, by contrast, seems to blur that line in reverse — public property is being made into something closer to a branded estate.”
