Suddenly — make that again — the Trump critics are aghast.
The reason this time?
President Trump — the only president in history whose private sector career was centered around building buildings and buying real estate — has gone ahead with a decided upgrade of the East Wing of the White House.
The Trump objective, of course, is to improve the building by replacing the suite of East Wing rooms generally associated with the Office of the First Lady with a serious, major-league ballroom that Presidents will be able to use for official entertainment of good-sized crowds. And, as noted, his critics are, but of course, crazed.
As a former White House staffer myself, I can certainly attest that, as the old building is currently structured, there is a decided limit to the size of crowds a president can welcome at a time. The famous East Room is not as big as some appear to think, and crowds of visitors, of necessity, spill out into the adjacent Green, Blue, and Red Rooms along with the State Dining Room and the grand Cross Hall.
Trump, as noted, the sole builder to hold the presidency, has envisioned a considerably larger-sized ballroom that will allow presidents to entertain on a larger scale — something that is routine in the residences of various global heads of state.
What is remarkable, if not surprising, is the apparent complete lack of knowledge by Trump critics of previous architectural changes to the building by Trump’s many predecessors.
No one today gives a second thought to the endless flow of stories that reference the Oval Office or the West Wing without understanding that neither was part of the original White House. (RELATED: America’s Progressive Descent Into Psychosis)
It was all the way back there in the turn of the 20th century — 1902 — that President Theodore Roosevelt authorized the razing of greenhouses that were eventually replaced by what we now know as the “West Wing.” The Oval Office as America has come to know it came to be in the term of TR’s successor, William Howard Taft.
As the 20th century moved on, it was the polio-stricken President Franklin Roosevelt — for whom swimming was a doctor-recommended method of exercising his paralyzed legs — who had the first White House swimming pool installed. Later — oh the horror! — the pool was drained and covered over by President Nixon, who had it redone into what Americans now see frequently as the White House press room.
In 1948, during the Harry Truman presidency, a leg of daughter Margaret Truman’s piano fell through the floor in her room. The end result was the realization that the ancient interior of the building — supported by the original wooden beams of the 1800s — would have to be removed, and the original wooden beams holding the building together replaced with modern steel beams.
Thus began the most massive reconstruction of the building during the Truman era.
As a White House staffer, I learned in some detail what had been done to the building during Truman’s term. The work was so extensive that President and Mrs. Truman were moved across Pennsylvania Avenue to live in the official White House guest facility known as Blair House. It was there, interestingly, that the president narrowly survived an armed assault by Puerto Rican nationalists, with a uniformed Secret Service officer guarding the building fatally shot as the Secret Service did battle with the terrorists.
There are photographs, as this one here, of the White House interior after the Truman reconstruction had begun. As can be seen, the entire interior of the building was removed. In its place went a restored rebuilding, with the exception that the interior framework of the original building — all wood beams — was replaced with modern, 1950s-era steel.
What President Trump is about is making a new East Wing with a decidedly expansive place where future presidents, like so many of their head-of-state peers, have the room to seriously entertain a large number of guests from around the globe and around the country.
It was President Gerald Ford, a decided lover of swimming, who had the first outdoor swimming pool installed on the grounds.
There are more of these types of stories of this or that president adding to or changing the architecture of the White House, whether building the West Wing, creating the Oval Office, building a swimming pool, and more.
Which is to say, all the outraged hoopla over Trump’s reconstruction of the East Wing is nothing more than hoopla from a collection of historical ignoramuses who have zero idea about the changes over the decades — centuries! — to the White House.
Based on President Trump’s serious record in building new buildings (say, Trump Tower) or restoring old ones (Mar-a-Lago) it is more than safe to say that Trump’s replacement of the existing East Wing will be — as seen in this artist’s rendering from CBS News — both stunning in looks and more than useful for the entertainment and business purposes for which it has been designed.
In the meantime, perhaps just this once, the president’s critics, amply demonstrating their lack of knowledge of White House architectural history, will find this a useful moment to either read up or be silent — or both.
But don’t bet on it.
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