If we’ve learned anything in the first nine months of Trump’s second go-round in the White House, it’s that it doesn’t take long to destroy something. And in the defining era of the Roberts Court — which has celebrated and enabled Republican presidents’ “bold and unhesitating action” — one man can direct the destruction. Solo. Moved by nothing but whim and ego. We have no oversight. No accountability. And no accounting for taste.
President Donald Trump’s promise that his enormous new ballroom wouldn’t touch or interfere with the existing structure was no longer operative. The assurances from his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that “nothing will be torn down” do not seem to have been made in good faith. With damning visual evidence that the ballroom project would radically alter the design of the White House and its stately grounds, the public began to pay attention, absorbing the worrisome details: that the new 90,000-square-foot structure would now seat not 650 but 999 people, dwarfing the original 1792 White House designed by the immigrant architect James Hoban; that the price was ballooning, from $200 million to $300 million; and that the ballroom would be connected to Hoban’s Georgian-style mansion by a glass bridge.
Where do we go from here?
We don’t know, and we don’t know if the president knows, given how quickly his promises about this terribly reckless project, to be built by Clark Construction, are evolving. The American Institute of Architects asked for answers in August, months before the heavy equipment rolled in to start the destruction; on Tuesday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanded that the White House pause the demolition and submit the ballroom plans to “the legally required public review process.” But it takes almost no time to reduce history to rubble, and by Thursday afternoon Roosevelt’s wartime addition to the White House complex was gone.
And now the erratic man in the White House has hatched another idea: an Arc de Trump.
From Harrison Design: