Bulldozing History: Trump’s $300 M White House Ego Wing
He’s literally tearing down the White House East Wing to build a Trump-branded ballroom-erasing history in real time. It’s the latest salvo in a war on American memory, and the only way to fight back
I watch a wrecking ball swing into the White House and feel the ground shake beneath my feet (figuratively - as I’m watching a shaky vertical video on my phone, of course). Dust and disbelief fill the autumn air on Pennsylvania Avenue as the East Wing crumbles, a century of history reduced to rubble before my eyes.1 The President of the United States is literally bulldozing part of the White House to make room for a 90,000-square-foot, gold-plated ballroom emblazoned with his name. This isn’t a fever dream or a parody skit - it’s happening in real time, and it’s the most garishly literal act of historical erasure America has ever seen.
The East Wing of the White House lies in ruins after being completely demolished to make way for Trump’s new $300 million ballroom. I slip closer to the chain-link fence, peering at the carnage. Broken masonry and twisted steel are all that remain of what was once the social entrance to the People’s House. The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden - gone, bulldozed along with the First Lady’s wing.2 Six towering trees, including historic magnolias planted to honor Presidents FDR and Harding - gone, chopped down without ceremony. Trump’s crews even paved over the iconic Rose Garden earlier this year to lay sterile stone where Jackie Kennedy once nurtured flowers.3 It’s like watching someone torch a Rembrandt or smash a museum exhibit - “painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting,” as one aghast presidential historian put it. And yet here we are, witnessing American history get obliterated with a grin and a gold shovel.
Trump had promised back in July that “none” of the White House’s existing structure would be touched by his renovation. That was a lie - surprise! Now the entire East Wing is dust and memory, the victim of a rapid demolition that began just days after ground was broken. The project is moving at breakneck speed, and images of the East Wing reduced to rubble have sent shockwaves even through those cynical from years of Trumpian spectacle. White House old-timers and historians are horrified, voicing a “chorus of disgust” at this desecration. The administration’s response? Shrug and call it “manufactured outrage.” To them, it’s as if the outrage isn’t real - as if we’re all just imagining that a piece of 1902 Theodore Roosevelt architecture, expanded by FDR in 1942, has been jackhammered out of existence. In Trumpworld, gaslighting isn’t just metaphorical; they’ll tell you up is down while literally knocking down the house.
The White House “Ego Wing”
They’re dubbing this monstrosity a “grand ballroom,” but let’s call it what it is: the White House Ego Wing. Trump complained that the historic East Room (capacity ~200) was too small for his liking - so he’s building a gilded pleasure dome nearly double the size of the entire White House. We’re talking 90,000 square feet of marble and gold, big enough for 999 guests and dwarfing the actual presidential mansion like a McMansion on steroids. The design? Uncanny in its resemblance to the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago - basically Palm Beach on the Potomac, complete with the tacky opulence of Trump’s private club.
The price tag comes to a cool $300 million, and Trump crows that not a penny is taxpayer money. Instead, “many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly” are footing the bill. Indeed, the donor list reads like a who’s who of corporate sycophants: Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google - even defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Palantir have chipped in. Nothing says public spirit like Silicon Valley and military contractors financing a palatial presidential party hall in exchange for who-knows-what future favors. As former Bush speechwriter David Frum observed, there’s “something profoundly symbolic” about Trump swinging a wrecking ball at the White House, paid for by cronies looking to buy influence. It’s the ultimate insider deal: treat public assets as private property, while Congress watches in complicit silence.
Let’s linger on that image: a wrecking ball literally smashing the People’s House so a billionaire president can host soirées for 1,000 of his closest fans. When criticized, Trump’s lackeys justify it with a straight face. On Fox News, Stephen Miller dismissed the East Wing as a “cheaply built add-on” that was “badly in need of renovation” anyway. In other words, we did history a favor by knocking it down. This is the spin from an administration that can’t tell the difference between restoration and destruction. Never mind that the East Wing was a beloved workspace for First Ladies for decades, home to the East Colonnade and Jackie Kennedy’s garden of hope. To these guys, it’s just cheap drywall to be ripped out and replaced with Trumpian glamour. Historical significance? Who cares. If it isn’t about him, it’s expendable.
Perhaps the most telling moment came when Trump bragged about how easy it was to get this project rolling. “Sir, this is the White House, you’re the President… you can do anything you want,” he quoted his advisors, marveling that he had “no approvals” to worry about.4 He recounted it like a kid in a candy store: start tonight, build whatever you want. The normal checks and planning commissions? Ignored. (In fact, he blew off the National Capital Planning Commission entirely, breaking ground with zero sign-off.) Trump is literally giddy at the idea that, unlike his real-estate days, as President he can ride roughshod over every rule. The East Wing fiasco lays it bare: Trump views the presidency as a blank check for his ego. The White House isn’t a public institution to him - it’s a stage for self-aggrandizement, American heritage be damned.
Rewriting America’s Story, One Institution at a Time
This ballroom blitz at 1600 Pennsylvania is just one front in Trump’s broader campaign to rewrite American history to his liking. The goal is simple: erase anything that doesn’t flatter Dear Leader, and stamp “TRUMP” on everything that does. He’s not content with smashing physical history; he’s coming for the stories, the symbols, the culture that define us.
Look at Washington’s other landmarks. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts - that grand memorial to a beloved president - is already in Trump’s crosshairs. In August he brazenly mused that the institution “could bear his name” within days.5 Some Republicans are tripping over themselves to make it happen: Congressman Bob Onder introduced the Make Entertainment Great Again Act (yes, that’s the actual name) to rename the Kennedy Center after Donald J. Trump. As if that weren’t enough sacrilege, House Republicans have already voted to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House for Melania Trump - because nothing says patron of the arts like a First Lady famous for a plagiarized speech and a jacket that said “I really don’t care.” Trump even installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center, purged its bipartisan board, and stocked it with loyalists.6 He dissolved the Center’s arts education programs and now personally vets which artists get honored, nixing anyone deemed “too woke.” In short, Trump is turning America’s foremost arts institution into a personal branding vehicle. The message is clear: take an icon of American culture (named for a president who championed the arts) and rebrand it in Trump’s image.
It doesn’t stop at the Kennedy Center. Down the road, the Smithsonian Institution is under siege too. The Trump White House has ordered a sweeping review of all 19 Smithsonian museums to ensure their exhibits are “patriotic” enough. In March, Trump signed an Orwellian executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing museums to purge “improper, divisive, or anti-American” content. Translation: any historical facts or narratives that don’t serve the MAGA storyline are to be scrubbed or sanitized. They gave the Smithsonian 120 days to “replace” any such content with more “unifying” and state-approved versions. We’re watching the Ministry of Truth take shape in real time: the world’s largest museum complex being strong-armed into a propaganda arm.
The chilling effects are already visible. Not long ago, Smithsonian curators removed an exhibit reference to Trump’s two impeachments - poof, gone from the timeline of presidential history. (Officials sheepishly claimed no one explicitly told them to do it, but who needed to? The writing was on the wall in big gold letters.) Trump’s people want a Disneyfied American history: all triumph, no trauma. The President himself has griped that museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was” - a remark as absurd as it is revealing. Apparently, acknowledging our nation’s original sin is too “divisive” for the fragile egos in charge. They’d rather our national museums gloss over genocide, whitewash oppression, and present a fairy tale version of America that conveniently omits any critique of injustice. It’s history as fan fiction - facts edited or excised to flatter the Emperor.
If this sounds like a full-on war on memory, that’s because it is. Trump’s campaign to defund and control cultural institutions is a coordinated blitzkrieg. He’s tried to zero out the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, starving independent culture while pouring millions into his own gaudy projects. He’s actively firing and replacing scholars on federal humanities boards with partisan hacks. At every turn, the strategy is the same: knock out the truth-tellers, install toadies, and rewrite the narrative. A Time magazine piece rightly called it “a systematic, full-frontal assault on our nation’s cultural and intellectual life.” We are watching in real time as heritage is politicized and propaganda becomes policy.
Consider what’s at stake if we let this happen. Authoritarians always target art and history first, because those are the keepers of collective memory. No democracy can survive on one man’s fiction. We know this playbook: Nazi Germany had its book burnings and “Degenerate Art” exhibits; Soviet regimes mandated sanitized history; today, Hungary’s autocrat Orbán warps cultural institutions to his narrative. Trump is reading from the same script, even if his version involves more gilded wallpaper and fewer mustaches. The endgame is the same: a populace unmoored from truth, taught only a mythologized past that glorifies the Leader. As one museum alliance warned, this is paving the way for outright censorship and thought control. If we lose the ability to tell our true history - warts and all - we lose the ability to learn from it, to hold leaders accountable, to fight back. And that’s exactly what Trump wants.
Even Richard Nixon, that grand champion of American disgrace, never got away with this kind of legacy-laundering. Ever notice how there’s no major airport named after Nixon? That’s no accident. In fact, of the last dozen presidents, only two lack an airport in their name: Nixon (who left in shame) and one other recent president.7 Nixon’s name is largely confined to the dustbin; just two small public schools still bear it, both christened before Watergate made “Tricky Dick” a cautionary tale. American tradition has been that if you betray the public trust, your legacy is asterisked, not celebrated. Trump knows this. He fears the post-presidency fate of pariahs and crooks. And so he’s building himself into the seat of power, literally and figuratively, while he still can. No one’s rushing to rename their elementary school after Donald J. Trump - so he’s renaming the Kennedy Center after himself instead. No city is clamoring for a Trump International Airport - so he’s making the White House itself his monument. This ballroom, this gaudy Ego Wing, is meant to ensure that his name physically occupies American history, indelible, like a tacky plaque bolted to a sacred landmark. It’s legacy by brute force.
Fighting Back with Truth (The Trumpsonian)
How do we fight this? How do we defend reality when the bulldozers are literally at the gate? The answer: with truth, with memory, and with defiant laughter. We do it by documenting everything, preserving the facts they want to purge, and wielding satire as a weapon against lies. If Trumpism is an assault on American memory, consider this the resistance - history’s revenge tour.
That’s why a group of us are building something bold: The Trumpsonian. History will not be gaslit. The Trumpsonian is our pop-up antidote to Trump’s campaign of erasure - a traveling, immersive museum of the ugly truth, ready to go toe-to-toe with the propaganda machine. Think of it as the unofficial, un-presidential library of Donald J. Trump. It’s a satirical, in-your-face carnival of facts that will chronicle the corruption, cruelty, and chaos of the Trump era with receipts, humor, AR/VR wizardry, and righteous rage. Where Trump builds a temple of ego, we’ll build a temple of truth - except ours will be fun, freaky, and impossible to ignore.
We’re doing this because memory is a weapon. Trump wants the nation to forget - to forget the kids in cages, the “both sides” apologia for Nazis, the two impeachments, the coup attempt. The Trumpsonian exists to make damn sure we remember. If they censor it in the Smithsonian, we’ll show it here in vivid color. If they tear it down, we’ll pop it back up. We’ll use augmented reality to overlay the truth onto the lies, literally. We’ll use humor to sugar-coat the bitter pills, to keep people engaged and sharing. And we’ll channel the outrage into action: the final room of our exhibit isn’t just a gift shop - it’s a grassroots activation hub, with voter registration forms, protest toolkits, and a pledge wall to commit visitors to defending democracy. This is not just a museum; it’s a bastion of resistance.
Now, here’s where you come in. Trump’s cronies forked over $300 million for his vanity ballroom. Surely we can raise 1% of that for the truth. If the ultra-rich and corporate interests can cough up nine figures to help Trump literally rewrite history in marble and gold, then the rest of us can find a few million to make sure the real story is preserved for all to see. Think about it: he’s building a monument to lies and ego; we’re building a monument to facts and accountability. If that isn’t worth at least one-one-hundredth of the investment, what is? The Trumpsonian is scrappy and grassroots - we don’t need gold-plated faucets or crystal chandeliers, just enough fuel to take this show on the road and shine a light in the darkness.
History is watching. This is our last, best chance to stop the memory hole from devouring the truth. Trump may be wielding wrecking balls and executive orders, but we wield something even more powerful: the truth and a sense of humor. We’re going to remember, we’re going to document, and we’re going to laugh in the face of this authoritarian absurdity - and by God, we’re going to make sure future generations remember it too. So let’s do this. If Trump can build a ballroom on the rubble of history, we can build a bulwark of memory on the foundation of truth. Open your eyes, open your wallets, and join us - because the fight for America’s story is on, and we intend to win.
In the words of Jackie Kennedy’s grandson, who watched in dismay as his grandmother’s beloved White House sanctuaries were destroyed: “My grandmother saw America in full color - Trump sees black and white. Where she planted flowers, he poured concrete.”8 We will not let those flowers die in vain. We will replant them with the seeds of truth, watered by our determination. The Trumpsonian stands as a defiant act of remembrance. No, history will not be erased. Not if we have anything to say about it. History will not be gaslit, not on our watch. It’s time to raise our voices, raise some hell, and yes, raise some money - because the truth still matters, and we’re going to prove it.
Let’s make sure that when future Americans look back at this moment, they’ll see that we fought back. Let them visit our pop-up museum of truth and say, “Wow, they didn’t go quietly.” Let Trump have his gaudy ballroom - we’re building a legacy of truth that will outlast any of his plaster and paint. The truth is our history, and we’re not going to let it be rewritten without a fight.