The surprise and shock that so many people felt at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House — soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious, oversized ballroom — is itself, in some ways, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, hasty demolition may seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence and open perversion of the law, outrage over the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar can seem strangely ill-judged.
And yet this is not the case. We are symbolic creatures and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest architecture critic, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romanticism of modernity caught in the iron latticework of the Eiffel Tower, these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, and not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of the democratic tradition, so perfectly reflected in American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man seated in deep contemplation.
The same sober values of democracy have always marked the White House – a majestic house, but not imperial. It is “the people’s house”, but it has also been, historically, a family home, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a small place, by monarchy standards, and that’s a blessing: suited to a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief period, and at the whim of the people. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the president is only a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed period of time. That was the beauty of it.
The East Wing has never been a place of greatness. The structure as we knew it was built during the anxious years of World War II. It was an attempt by Franklin Roosevelt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not coincidentally, carve out a safe haven underneath. But it quickly became a discreet center of power. Eleanor Roosevelt welcomed women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The very simplicity of the wing came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not a spectacle; for the rituals of supporting civic life, not for the exhibition of personal glory.
All that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the focal point: a kind of performance intended to show Trump’s arbitrary power over the presidency, including his physical seat. He doesn’t ask anyone’s permission, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s first public acts, after promising the Metropolitan Museum of Art the magnificent limestone reliefs on the facade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.
Trump supporters say previous presidents have also changed the White House. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George HW Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama build a basketball court? What’s the problem? And besides, who other than elitists would object to a grand ballroom that resembles the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what is appropriate and what is vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark period, limits itself to stating that it has been authorized to create a digital record of what is destroyed – as if it were a defense rather than an epitaph.
This is, of course, the standard line of Trump apologies: Some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a president who actually upheld the Constitution. This is an incompatible form of correspondence. If Trump is blowing up boats with unknown people on board, well, hasn’t Obama used drones against suspected terrorists? (Yes, but in a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve a chain of command and a vestige of due process.) If Trump releases a video portraying himself as the combat pilot he never was, throwing feces at peaceful protesters — well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson curse at his aides from his toilet seat? What’s the problem? The jabs and insults of previous presidents, however crude, remained within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side can also make their case. Even Richard Nixon met with student protesters early in the morning – at the Lincoln Memorial – and tried to understand what was motivating them.
