PrintAnger over the White House ballroom is purely performative
I love the leftists on my Facebook page, the old classmates and co-workers of mine who live in the fever swamps. It’s not that I love their politics, which are vile. It’s that they provide me with a front row seat to leftist thinking.
What’s currently got their knickers in a twist isn’t the shutdown (although they periodically pipe up to complain about women losing their medical care). Instead, dutifully responding to orders from headquarters, they are utterly incensed that Donald Trump is remodeling the East Wing of the White House. The great irony is that the people shrieking most loudly belong to the same class of people who tried to burn the White House and tore down Founders’ statues in 2020.
So, here’s a little background. The East Wing of the White House was nothing fancy. It was hastily built in 1942, when D.C. was inundated with people working on WWII-related matters. (If you’d like to see a charming 1943 romantic comedy about the housing shortage this flood of people caused, I highly recommend The More The Merrier.) In other words, the East Wing was not a historically significant architectural gem. It was a hastily created office space.
Image created using AI.
Contrary to what many people probably believe, the East wing isn’t in or even that near to the historic main building. Instead, it’s located some distance away, with a connecting pavilion that allows office workers to go back and forth without being assaulted by D.C. weather.
Up until recently, the East Wing was home to offices. The most famous was the First Lady’s office, with other facilities being the Social Office, the Graphics and Calligraphy Office, and a little family theater for the President and his family. In other words, nothing is historically significant, and everything can be rehoused in other parts of the building or in a fully renovated building.
As many have pointed out, this isn’t the first time the White House has been upgraded. Modernization began in the 1830s to add running water and central heating. Gas lighting appeared in 1848. After the Civil War and through the end of the 19th century, the White House got functional bathrooms, a telephone, an interior design upgrade, and electricity.
In 1902, Roosevelt did a major architectural overhaul to restore the Neoclassical look and to build the West Wing. William Howard Taft augmented the West Wing with the now-iconic Oval Office. Woodrow Wilson added an elevator and a primitive ice-based air-conditioning system. Coolidge improved that with the first central air-conditioning system.
After WWII, as the White House’s main building showed signs of structural deterioration, a major upgrade took place during Harry Truman’s administration. That remodel included building what amounts to bomb shelters.
To the cooing delight of the media, Jackie Kennedy oversaw an interior design remodel. Significantly, this was largely funded by private funds.
Nixon took out FDR’s swimming pool to create the press briefing room and upgraded the situation room. Jimmy Carter placed hideous solar panels on the roof, which Reagan removed. Reagan updated communications and security, while Nancy remodeled the private quarters. George Bush Sr. renovated the kitchen and guest rooms, and upgraded the situation room and HVAC.
Clinton installed internet access and major security and IT upgrades, and re-landscaped the south grounds. Dubya strengthened the perimeter, rebuilt the Situation Room, and upgraded the West Wing offices. Obama did a complete green energy retrofit, upgraded the family quarters, installed a basketball court, and upgraded the movie theater. During his first term, Trump upgraded the West Wing, renovated the Oval Office, replaced the HVAC system, and improved security. Biden did the same.
In his second term, Trump turned the Rose Garden from a central grassy swamp that sucked up women’s dress shoes into a prettily hardscape central area surrounded by roses. And of course, he’s just used private funds to tear down the 1942 office building to make beautiful new offices and create a grand ballroom, fitting for the most important country in the world.
Before the remodel, “big” events were being held in the East Room, which is part of the main building complex. The East Room is less than 3,000 square feet, which is incredibly small for a presidential event space for—again—the most important country in the world. It was built in a smaller time when we weren’t that important.
The new ballroom will be “yuuuge,” which is appropriate to America’s status. Significantly, the entire remodel will be funded solely by private funds ($250 million for a project to be completed on our 250th anniversary). That’s why Congress had no role in this decision. Taxpayers aren’t on the hook for any of this.
There’s one more thing to cover before getting to my precious leftists and their White House ballroom hysteria: If you cast your mind back to 2020, you may remember that leftist protestors tried to set the White House on fire. Additionally, leftists across America attacked and destroyed American history.
It wasn’t just monuments to Confederate leaders that went. The Founders and other key presidents went, too. Just some examples were the toppling of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues in Portland, the removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue in Georgia, and the removal (later, a relocation) of the Teddy Roosevelt statue from the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. American history wasn’t very sacred then.
With that set up, here are just some of the posters that the leftists I collected over a life mostly lived in the San Francisco Bay Area have been relentlessly reposting content about the ballroom, all of it powered by Trump Derangement Syndrome:
Internet meme.
My favorite are the theory about why Trump is tearing down the East Wing: It’s to get rid of reminders of the Obama years, and to erase the legacy of all Democrat First Wives. Yes, really. These two posters say it all:
My leftist friends also compulsively retweet “Occupy Democrats” images. I won’t repost them here, but let’s just say that they live in a world of paranoia that’s untouched by reality, including threatening contractors working on the project with imprisonment, and relaying that the execrable David Axelrod said that the White House is a “hallowed space.” This hysteria is unmatched.
I really don’t have a conclusion for this post. I’ll let you write your own.
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