The wrecking balls hit the East Wing this week, and with them, another piece of America’s history crumbled under Donald Trump’s command. The 79-year-old president, who once swore the White House would remain “untouched,” is now ripping through its eastern flank to make room for a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom — a gilded vanity project that dwarfs not just the White House itself, but any notion of public consent.
“You can start tonight, you have no approvals,” Trump reportedly boasted to his contractors, calling the crash of demolition “music to my ears.”
That sound, to many, is less music than mourning. The East Wing — the part of the Executive Mansion that hosted decades of public tours, ceremonies, and history — has been leveled. It’s gone. And with it, say critics, something deeper is being erased: the shared cultural memory of the nation’s most symbolic home.
Matthew Vincent, an archaeologist and program director at the American Center of Research in Jordan, didn’t mince words when asked about the demolition. “The first reaction I had was, what the f—? It’s not OK. The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump—it’s a federal building, a taxpayer building, belonging to the American people,” he told The Daily Beast.
Vincent has spent decades studying the wreckage of civilizations — literally. His work recovering looted artifacts in Syria and Iraq has brought him face-to-face with the devastation left by ISIS. And in Trump’s demolition of the White House, he sees echoes of that same cultural annihilation.
“What he’s doing is horrific and done without any oversight or acknowledgment from the bodies that should oversee this—and certainly not with the American people,” Vincent said.
Then he dropped the comparison that’s been ricocheting through preservation circles all week: “Behind this is an ideology—to disregard the past and those who came before it: ‘If we don’t like something, we erase it. Party lines matter more than history. We’ll erase the past to paint one side of a story’—and that’s just what ISIS did.”
To many, it’s a shocking analogy. But Vincent’s point hits hard: when power decides the past is inconvenient, bulldozers follow.
ISIS militants, he notes, blew up ancient temples and museums not only to shock the world, but to rewrite history — to narrow what a society could remember about itself. “It’s two sides of the same coin,” Vincent said. “Ideologically driven people are burning down the past to present one side of the picture and remove the story of the other side.”
And now, in Washington, the erasure continues.
The Rose Garden — once a living testament to Jacqueline Kennedy’s vision — was paved over years ago to make way for a Mar-a-Lago-style terrace. “Never again will we hear a reporter say they are in the Rose Garden,” Vincent lamented. “It will always now be what Trump wanted to paint—without permission from the American people.”
Former first lady Jackie Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, shared the outrage. Posting an old family photo to Instagram, he tore into the president’s destruction of his grandmother’s legacy. “My grandmother saw America in full color—Trump sees black and white,” he wrote. “Where she planted flowers, he poured concrete. She brought life to the White House, because our landmarks should inspire and grow with our country.”
Schlossberg didn’t hold back on the stakes, either: “Her Rose Garden is gone, but the spirit of the Kennedy White House lives on—in the young at heart, the strong in spirit, and in a new generation answering the call to service. A year from now, we’ll get our last chance to stop Trump. History is watching.”
But the president isn’t slowing down. The demolition of the East Wing — including its colonnade, the First Lady’s office, the family theater, the visitors center, and even the trees commemorating presidents Harding and FDR — was completed in less than four days. The destruction, carried out without congressional oversight, is the largest physical alteration to the White House in modern times.
Even Hillary Clinton, who lived there for eight years, blasted the move: “It’s not his house,” she wrote on X. “It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed off the backlash, calling it “performative outrage” and framing the ballroom as a “routine upgrade.” But nothing about a 90,000-square-foot mega-ballroom — one that will literally overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House — is routine.
Vincent says Americans need to wake up before the nation’s symbols are permanently defaced. “The checks and balances that have been part of the government are gone now, and it reveals a much deeper problem in the U.S. and the ideologies there,” he said. “The way of working in the U.S. isn’t that people will storm the Capitol to save the East Wing, but they should be clamoring for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. It is not OK.”
For now, all that remains of the East Wing is dust and the hollow promise of a ballroom Trump says will “define an era.” Maybe it will — just not in the way he imagines.
Because the story of this moment won’t be about grandeur or gold leaf. It’ll be about a man who took a wrecking ball to history itself, and the country that let him do it.
