The surprise and shock that so many people registered at the photographs of Donald Trump's destruction of the East Wing of the White House, which will soon be replaced by his own ostentatious and vast ballroom, is in itself in some ways surprising and shocking. In Trump's long list of looting, the hasty demolition may seem like a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence and open defiance of the law, gasping in outrage at the loss of several tons of masonry and mortar may seem strangely misguided.
And yet this is not so. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The belief in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the iron bars of the Eiffel Tower, are not ideas imposed on buildings, but ideals that the buildings themselves express more lastingly than words. Among them, not least, is the humble, egoless ideal of the democratic tradition, so beautifully reflected in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which depicts not a hero but a man sitting in serious contemplation.
The same restrained values ​​of democracy have always characterized the White House – a stately home, but not an imperial one. It is a “people's house” but historically it was also a family home with family rooms and a family scale. This is a small place by the standards of a monarchy, and fortunately: suitable for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a short time and at the request of the people. As Ronald Reagan said, after winning more decisively than Trump could have ever dreamed, the president was just a temporary resident holding the keys in his hands for a limited period of time. This was all the beauty.
The East Wing was never a grand place. The building as we knew it was built during the turbulent years of World War II. It was Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to bring order to the clutter of office space and, not coincidentally, to create a safe haven beneath it. But he quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy led a different kind of transformation in the same office, founding the White House Historical Association. The very simplicity of the wing became a symbol of the functional modesty of democratic government: a place for staff, not for spectacle; to maintain the rituals of civic life rather than to display personal glory.
All this is gone now. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance art intended to demonstrate Trump's arbitrary power over the presidency, including its physical location. He doesn't ask anyone's permission, he destroys what he wants and when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump's first public acts when he promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building was to impatiently smash them into dust.
Trump apologists say previous presidents also changed the White House. Didn't Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn't George H. W. Bush build the horseshoe pit? Didn't Barack Obama build a basketball court? What's all the fuss? And anyway, who, except the elite, would object to a large ballroom that looked like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what is decent and what is vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with the caution that has become typical of these dark times, limited itself to saying that it was allowed to make a digital record of what was being destroyed – as if it were a defense rather than an epitaph.
This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is revealed, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, remotely similar act by a president who actually respected the Constitution. This is a form of mismatch. If Trump blows up boats with unknown people on board – didn't Obama use drones against suspected terrorists? (Yes, but in a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve the chain of command and vestiges of due process.) If Trump releases a video of himself portraying himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping excrement on peaceful protesters – well, didn't Lyndon Johnson berate his aides from his toilet seat? What's all the fuss? However, the jabs and insults of previous presidents, no matter how rude they were, remained within the framework of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side must also defend its point of view. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters at the Lincoln Memorial early one morning and tried to understand what motivated them.
