The walls come tumbling down

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Everyone says the same thing the first time they go inside the White House: It’s much smaller than they expected.

Inside the West Wing, the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and the offices of top officials are within steps of one another. The executive mansion, with its great state spaces like the East Room and State Dining Room, is elegant, but intimate. The cross hall, leading to the front door on the north front of the building, is imposing but not overwhelming. This is where the haunting picture of a pensive John F. Kennedy usually hangs, and where President Barack Obama walked down a long red carpet to announce the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. There’s nothing like the scenes in the TV show “The West Wing” with idealistic young staffers doing the walk-and-talk through endless corridors of busy power players. If you tried to do that in the real West Wing, you’d hit a wall and break your nose.

Most presidents — unlike Trump, who loaded up the Oval Office with gold trinkets — stick to traditional dignified furnishings. The place is tasteful but discreet. It hums with quiet intensity. But it’s not brawny. The power here is great, and it enhances itself through understatement. There is no need to boast.

Most visitors to the White House, for a tour or a Christmas party, would enter through the East Wing, a low-slung annex with a white-columned entrance. Guests traversed a corridor between wood panels, with doors leading off to office complexes for the first lady. Walls that soaked up history kept alive the aura of Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan. This was Eleanor Roosevelt’s domain.

That’s all gone now, turned into dust and rubble in a couple of extraordinary days when backhoes ripped apart the East Wing on the orders of President Donald Trump, who is itching to build his $300 million dollar ballroom in its place.

There may never have been a better metaphor for a presidency. Trump has spent nine months tearing away at the federal government, the rule of law and democracy. Now he’s turned his wrecking ball on the White House itself. All without consulting the citizens who gave him a temporary lease on the place.

Democrats, preservationists and historians slammed Trump as a philistine. His press flacks counter that many presidents changed the White House. Franklin Roosevelt built the current Oval Office. Harry S. Truman gutted the entire interior and reconstructed it to stop it collapsing. But no modern president contemplated Trump’s sudden, violent destruction — which followed his paving over of the iconic Rose Garden to emulate the terrace at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida, complete with yellow sun umbrellas.

So, what about the ballroom? The grand design seems to get bigger every time Trump pulls out his prints of artist’s impressions. Visiting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte looked surprised to get a sneak preview of plans for Trump’s new labor of love rather than maps of war-rattled Europe in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Trump now envisages a massive edifice, of at least 90,000 square feet — almost twice the size of the White House itself, and daubed with his signature gold leaf — that could accommodate huge events and parties. Trump has rightly complained the White House lacks a large venue. He even offered to build one for the Obama administration after seeing marquees on the South Lawn for a foreign leader banquet. But one of the perks of a state dinner invite, in the East Room for instance, is that it’s cozy. Wherever you sit, you’re within a few feet of the president. That’s what makes it special.

Of all the shocking things Trump has done so far in his second term, the bulldozing of the East Wing is the most tangible. JCBs hacking away at the white plaster are likely to be among the defining images of this turbulent political era. But does the desecration of a not especially distinguished piece of architecture that most Americans will never visit really matter that much when millions are struggling with high grocery prices and rent? Probably not. That’s unless this moment comes to symbolize an increasingly profligate administration with plenty of cash for its pet priorities, like a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, but that seems oblivious to the cost of living — and dying, given high health care prices.

Perhaps Trump will live up to his promises and prove he’s one of America’s great builders, and the new facility will become as beloved as the East Wing in time. But given the long list of corporate donors, it may end up as a monument to corruption and an administration that supped with oligarchs.

Maybe the president is just misunderstood; maybe he’s being unfairly pilloried for gifting the nation a beautiful new facility. But this might also be the latest example of megalomania that mirrors autocrats’ obsessions with grand projects that will tower over citizens when they’re gone. Trump is also thinking of disrupting the classic Washington skyline with a huge arch (an Arc de Trump) across Memorial Bridge behind the Lincoln Memorial to mark America’s 250th birthday next year.

Ironically, the East Wing came tumbling down days after millions of Americans took part in anti-Trump protests last weekend under the banner of “No Kings.” The relative modesty of the White House, compared with the great castles and palazzos of Europe, was a reminder that the United States freed itself from monarchs and doesn’t need its leaders to live in palaces.

Try telling that to Trump.