There’s a way the light falls in the White House on autumn afternoons in Washington, thinning with the waning of the year, slanting, a dull gold the color of old parchment, that makes you feel you’ve slipped into a country where history isn’t past tense but a persistent whisper.
In the sad obscenity of the moment, one of the White House’s most beautiful spaces has been amputated, torn away from time and memory in an act of vulgar insult. The East Wing is lost now.
You once walked from the Visitors’ Foyer toward the East Wing, and the world narrowed to marble, glass, and the muffled hush of the People’s House breathing, working, constant and quiet.
It wasn’t grand in the old European sense; it was American grand, which is to say an old beauty, balanced and proper, perhaps a little improvised, a touch austere in places, and deeply intentional. It had the moral clarity of a church vestibule and, if you watched carefully, the workaday charm of a school hallway after the bell.
Generations of tourists and schoolkids and staffers honored to work there scuffed these floors. Marine sentries stooped to pick up a stray mitten and hand it back to a child who, only much later, would understand where she was.
The White House was never meant to be a palace, nor the Oval Office a throne room.
The East Wing was the living artery of the White House, the First Lady’s offices, the Social Office, the machinery of ceremonial democracy where symbolism gets translated into human scale. It’s where letters are answered and tours are staged; where holiday cards go from proofs to envelopes; where military families with tight smiles and damp eyes wait to meet a president who will say, “We remember.”
It was the workbench of the republic’s rituals, the place that once transformed policy into hospitality, power into presence, memory into history.
The first thing worth knowing is that the East Wing wasn’t always there; that is no defense of its obscene desecration today. Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 renovation gave us colonnades that linked the Residence to the outer offices, a balancing act of symmetry and purpose.
But the East Wing as we know it rose in 1942, a wartime facade to conceal the excavation of a bomb shelter beneath the lawn. We built gentility over fear; a classic American move, the practical architecture under the poised exterior. We added a Family Theater, because even during the worst of it, movies shaped our culture, the flickering consolation of stories in good times and bad.
The wing became a geography of grace notes: the East Garden that would later be coaxed into elegance by Jacqueline Kennedy; the corridor where photographs line up like a roll call of American life; the rooms that belong to prior First Ladies’ staffs, the keepers of continuity, the stewards of tone and memory. The current First Lady does not live or work in the White House except for brief, transactional appearances, and barely deserves the title.
Jacqueline Kennedy took the White House and made it an American cultural project without turning it into a museum. Her work wasn’t just about tables and fabrics; it was about the idea that the place mattered, that a nation with the existential threat of the bomb and a tide of trouble on the horizon also deserved elegance and art. Lady Bird Johnson gave us wildflowers and the conviction that beauty is public policy, too. Pat Nixon added to the collection with a practical eye, because good stewardship is rarely fashionable but always necessary. Rosalynn Carter welded compassion to competence.
Nancy Reagan wrapped it all in some theater, yes, but with a director’s sharp instinct for scene and consequence. Barbara Bush, in those kinder, gentler moments, welcomed those points of light to the East Wing. Hillary Clinton put a policy-nerd backbone into it; Laura Bush, a librarian’s quiet welcome to young readers. Michelle Obama threw the doors wide, cultivating White House gardens and kids’ health programs.
In every iteration, the East Wing kept the faith. It was the quiet liturgy of the American idea: welcome, steward, improve, and hand off to the next generation a little better and richer than before.
Then came our age of desecration, where every beloved historic treasure becomes a prop and every prop an instrument of power.
Donald Trump didn’t just misunderstand the East Wing; he loathes the category of things it represents.
He walked into a cathedral with a bullhorn, spray paint, and faux gold leaf. He saw a place designed for civic honor, official tenderness, and historical respect and wondered why it didn’t look more like a casino atrium, a glittery Liberace dreamscape.
The East Wing, under Melania Trump, became a mood board for grievance. The holiday corridors turned into a fever dream of performative menace, a pomo aesthetic that screamed more threat than holiday spirit. The Social Office, traditionally where protocol breathes, is now one more wing of the Department of Trolling, a conveyor belt of grotesque events staged not as acts of national hospitality but as moments for the Dear Leader to caper while his minions offer proofs of loyalty.
The White House grounds have become a gimcrack stage set, a regional dinner theater of the absurd.
It’s American malaise dressed up as blaring pageant: a stripper-pole segment added to a ballet, a spiritual emptiness that comes when a man confuses himself with a country and then tries to decorate the void in more and more gold leaf and Temu-grade gradeau.
There was, and still is, something transcendent about the White House, something balanced and quiet and stately. These are things Trump cannot abide. His vulgarity and transgression are a message that dignity and duty are for suckers; ego, payoffs, gilt ornaments and gaudy filigree are the sacrament.
And so the East Wing must be destroyed to make way for a grotesque carbuncle, a vile big-box Barbie Dream House ballroom so Trump can pack more in more paying sycophants per square foot.
I heard a particularly dumb take yesterday on this moment: the argument that Apple and Google and OpenAI and the other beggars at Trump’s feet are responsible for this.
It was a shallow and puerile excuse. They are, at best, symptoms, enablers, hollow men uttering the mantra of “shareholder value” to themselves.
This destruction, like all his other acts, is the pure, sole, personal responsibility of Donald John Trump, America’s most vile and vulgar president. Blaming the marks and the accommodationists is like saying Vichy France was responsible for the Holocaust.
Trump is the leader of a movement and moment of American rot and corruption. He is its Alpha and its Omega. Don’t mistake the cause of this for the men bankrolling it. It is Trump’s hatred of all that came before him that caused this vile moment.
The past is not past, and a White House is not just stone, boards, plaster and lath; it’s a body keeping the memory of our nation in it’s corners and joints.
The East Wing had known wartime and peacetime, tragedy and grace. It absorbed the grief of widows after Dallas and the tight-lipped resilience after September 11. It felt the scuff of wheelchairs when George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the staccato footsteps of schoolchildren. It welcomed diplomats and astronauts, athletes and scholars. That corridor remembers the comfort of a First Lady’s hand on a Gold Star mother’s sleeve. It remembers the volunteer docents, each one a small-town mythologist speaking the country back to itself.
And it remembers, now, the clatter of a regime that replaced it all with set dressing for authoritarian kitsch.
The desecration is not a broken façade. It’s a broken covenant.
This is not about the wall being savaged by demolition machines.
It’s about what the East Wing is supposed to accomplish in the American psyche. The West Wing, prior to this fallen era, was where decisions were forged under terrible pressure, the grim and necessary mechanics of governance. The East Wing is where the republic breathes out, where we make meaning beyond politics, show mercy, and demonstrate that democracy can have manners.
It’s the wing that says, “We remember you,” to the bereaved and “We see you,” to the overlooked. It was, in a functional theology of civic life, the chapel. We do not need our leaders to be saints, but we are right to insist they treat the people’s house with respect.
Trump’s desecrations go far beyond today, both subtle and loud. Subtle in the way any rot is: the corruption, the cruelty, the menace are a slow corrosion; you don’t notice the termites until the balustrade gives way. Loud in the way his grunting audience demanded: using the People’s House to stage partisan spectacle, turning the staff into actors in his America’s Most Vulgar reality show, collapsing the reverence due to shared spaces into a personal pageant.
If you strip the East Wing to install a grotesque, asymmetric hall to the Dear Leader, you erase its purpose. You erase our past, our shared legacies, our sacred spaces.
What happens to us when we allow our history and monuments to be torn down for ego and avarice? The damage is not contained to a lost facade or a destroyed portico, to a paint chip or an upholstery swatch.
It seeps into memory. The child who saw the White House at Christmastime is supposed to carry home the stubborn belief that the country can be beautiful and kind, and that she could work in that Oval Office one day. She is not supposed to carry home a sense that she crossed the threshold of a cult.
The East Wing is where we perform the rituals that bind an unruly republic: Easter Egg Rolls and Gold Star receptions, diplomatic receptions and dinners, the polite genius of state arrival ceremonies where we say to allies and rivals alike: this is who we are.
Protocol and memory that honor the past are the poetry of self-government. They’re the choreography of mutual respect. When you treat them as costume jewelry, they break.
I know the retort: “It’s just a ballroom; stop being dramatic.” But a nation is a set of stories told into objects. The chair at the table makes a claim. The place card makes a promise. The door held open at the exact right moment says, “We honor your dignity,” and the presence of a child at a ceremony says, “This doesn’t end with us.”
The East Wing was the place where that quiet language is spoken. Burn the dictionary and you’ll still have words, but you won’t have meaning.
Rick Wilson, the ad guy in me, will tell you optics matter because they encode values. Rick Wilson, the citizen, will tell you that destroying the East Wing signals something more dangerous than bad taste and vulgar transgression: a willingness to privatize the public sacred.
The slow vandalism of norms doesn’t begin with a coup; it begins with sneer quotes around the words “tradition” and “decorum.” Treat the People’s House like a personal club where you can extract tribute from lobbyists and corporate titans and you prepare the country to accept government as a private franchise.
Desecration begets a diminished nation, which begets indifference. And indifference is the graveyard of republics.
This is not nostalgia, for nostalgia is a history without edges or subtlety. It is an insistence that the brief occupants of the White House do not own it, do not have the right to destroy it, do not define it for all time.
The Truman reconstruction taught us that a beautiful facade can hide a collapsing interior; he gutted the place and rebuilt it so the metaphor wouldn’t swallow the building whole. That’s what we need now, again, not gilt to cover Trump’s guilt, not a temple to his greed and ego, but the hard, unglamorous carpentry of a national restoration.
We don’t need a palace. We need a People’s House that remembers what it’s for.
It will require one more turn of destruction, but it’s a demolition that puts us back on the path to our true selves as a nation.
Picture, then, the moment he is gone.
Again, the White House lawn echoes with construction machinery, removing the gaudy tumor of his ballroom, stripping it to the bare ground in a swift and certain way. It was a shabby thing, built cheap and fast, a strip-mall junk building covered in faux marble, a cheap imitation of European grandeur at odds with American dignity.
The day breaks on that new era, and earth movers fire up at the same moment and rip out the disco patio he installed in the Rose Garden. The stones he laid down are crushed, chipped to dust, not a sign of them left for a cult to claim from a landfill.
Picture the gardeners and groundskeepers, eager and ready to replant those rose bushes again, restoring one quiet place that belongs on those sacred 18 acres, not on the patio of Mar-a-Lago. Their hands and tools turn the soil, restoring life and dignity to a small space redolent with history.
Picture the careful work, the painstaking restoration of the East Wing and its facade beginning a few days later, an army of skilled craftsmen honored to work old magic with old tools to remake a lost space, guided by photos and plans, by memory and heart.
Picture the lights rising slowly in the East Wing at its re-dedication, the hush returning.
Picture a young staffer carrying a stack of envelopes for condolence letters, setting them gently on a desk polished by other hands, other years. Picture a volunteer pinning on a name tag and taking her place by the portrait of a First Lady who looks back with steady eyes.
Picture a Marine holding a door. Picture a child pressing a nose to the glass at the Colonnade and seeing the reflection of her own face and something beyond it: the outline of a country that belongs to her not because she is rich or loud but because she is here, because we said she belonged.
That is the opposite of desecration. It is restoration. It is dignity. It is respect.
That is the point of those 18 acres on Pennsylvania Avenue.
We must refuse to hand it over to the brutalists of spectacle, the partisans who believe quiet dignity and careful hospitality are weakness and that gaudy, transactional corruption is a national sacrament. We must steel ourselves against the performative contempt that turns civic life into pro-wrestling.
We must say it, constantly and stubbornly, that what happens in those rooms is not vanity; it is pedagogy. We teach ourselves how to be a country there.
In the long American argument between spectacle and substance, the East Wing has always taken the side of substance, by way of the quiet American display of proper humility and kindness.
It was the part of the house that said the loudest thing in the softest voice: this is yours.
Desecration tries to make that voice say, “This is his.”
Make Mar-a-lago a Museum and Research Center on American Fascism
We are past the point where there’s any argument about whether Donald Trump and his administration constitute an autocratic takeover of the U.S. government. His serial lawbreaking, his titanic corruption, his personal consolidation of power are clear threats to American Democracy. We can win back the Congress, and even the office of the President, but t…
An excellent piece. Regarding the billionaire lickspittles who are supposedly paying for this ballroom desecration, Rick writes "They are, at best, symptoms, enablers, hollow men uttering the mantra of “shareholder value” to themselves." It's as if these people have no sense of history, or care about their place in it. With so much wealth and influence, the things they could do to make the world a better place for everyone, they instead kneel before Trump and kiss the ring. All for what? More money, or just more of...something? Trump's place as the biggest asshole in American history is already secure. But these billionaire creeps, these enablers, for everything they've done and achieved in their lives, history will regard them with disdain as the 21st-century robber barrons that they are.
Well written, thank you. I would like to see Democrats do a weekly news conference in which they name a perpetrator among Trump's henchmen, a crime, and the maximum sentence, making clear these will be pursued when the time comes. Perhaps that would give pause to the likes of Miller, Vought, Bondi, Homan, etc.