Remember when Donald Trump said his ballroom wouldn’t “interfere with” the White House’s current structure? That was before he decided to destroy the East Wing.
In recent years, President Donald Trump and his allies have taken a firm stand in support of Confederate monuments. Sure, they’ve said, these statues honor proponents of slavery who took up arms against their fellow Americans and tried to tear the United States apart, but to move or alter these monuments in any way is to launch an attack on our collective history.
When it comes to destroying a third of the White House, however, the Republican president has embraced a very different perspective. NBC News reported:
The entire East Wing of the White House will be demolished ‘within days,’ according to two Trump administration officials. The demolition is a significant expansion of the ballroom construction project from what President Donald Trump said this summer.
This has turned into a political controversy with several moving parts, so let’s unpack the relevant details.
Moving the goalposts while moving the bulldozers: In July, the president assured the public that his ballroom project wouldn’t “interfere with” the current White House structure, adding, “It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” Months later, he authorized the destruction of the East Wing facade, then most of the wing and then, as things currently stand, the entirety of the wing.
Rising costs: On Tuesday, Trump mocked former President Barack Obama over the budget for the Democrat’s presidential library, claiming that the former president made a mistake by prioritizing “women and DEI to build it.
