critic’s
notebook
Trump’s
Vision of a Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac Upends an American Ideal
President
Trump’s “demolish first, ask questions later” approach highlights a tension
involved in a bipartisan desire to streamline the building process.
Michael
Kimmelman
By
Michael Kimmelman
Nov. 8,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/arts/design/east-wing-ballroom-trump.html
President
Trump is gunning to be the nation’s redecorator-in-chief.
He gilded
the Oval Office, paved the Rose Garden and held up a grapefruit-size model of
an “Arc de Trump” to face the Lincoln Memorial. In October, he issued “Making
Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” an executive order reviving a first
Trump term initiative.
Even as
Trump tried to cut food assistance during the shutdown, he showed off the new
marble bathroom he designed for the Lincoln bedroom the other day.
But his
biggest move, provoking bipartisan shock, was unleashing the wrecking balls
without warning on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to make room for a behemoth
ballroom.
Republicans
and Democrats don’t see eye to eye about much today. But they seem to agree on
the nation’s need to build things again by cutting through the mountains of red
tape that federal, state and local governments have accrued to offset
unchecked, top-down authority figures from bygone days, like Robert Moses, New
York City’s omnipotent planning czar.
Moses’s
imperial excesses and ruthlessness contributed to a cultural shift in America
during the 1970s. The pendulum swung from the Powers That Be toward People
Power.
Now
President Trump’s “demolish first, ask questions later” approach to the East
Wing highlights the unresolved tension involved in any push to get stuff done
by streamlining checks and balances: How can this be accomplished without
nudging the pendulum too far back in the other direction?
First
saying the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” Mr. Trump in
October suddenly razed the White House East Wing, recalling an incident from
his “Bonfire of the Vanities” days in New York.
In 1979,
Bonwit Teller, the Fifth Avenue department store, was hemorrhaging cash. It put
up for sale its midrise limestone-and-granite home designed by Warren &
Wetmore, the same architects who gave the city Grand Central Terminal.
Mr.
Trump, a 33-year-old real estate developer at the time, bought the building for
$15 million. His plan was to tear it down and erect Trump Tower. Mr. Trump
promised he would save and donate some prized limestone friezes on the facade
that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted, if the works could be safely
removed at a reasonable cost.
Then the
jackhammers arrived, unannounced, pulverizing the decorative friezes along with
some intricate Art Deco grillwork and provoking an avalanche of headlines. Mr.
Trump dismissed the criticism, insisting the friezes were worthless, despite
what the Met’s art experts said, and proclaimed the blowback a “fantastic
promotion” for his glassy, gaudy apartment tower.
There was
a footnote to the story. Mr. Trump’s demolition crew, a mix of Polish Americans
and undocumented immigrants, filed suit because of “horrid and terrible”
working conditions. After 15 years of litigation, Mr. Trump paid to settle the
case.
Today, he
has yet to lay out a clear design plan for the capital. He’s tinkering and
trolling. The other day, he instructed federal workers to paint the Kennedy
Center’s gold columns white. That particular shade of gold, Mr. Trump explained
to followers on Truth Social, was “fake looking.” He called the new color he
selected a “luxuriant white enamel.”
A paint
job can always be undone, unlike the East Wing demolition, which upset
preservationists and architectural historians less because the beloved
architecture it destroyed was exceptional — the wing wasn’t Jefferson’s
Monticello — than because it underscored the president’s contempt for precedent
and guardrails.
In
response, Mr. Trump fired members of an independent commission established by
Congress in 1910 to review architectural changes in the capital.
But polls
indicate he may have overstepped.
Americans,
millions of whom harbor fond memories of entering the People’s House on public
tours that started at the East Wing, say they’re unhappy with the demolition.
That includes a majority of independents and many Republicans, according to an
ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll at the end of October, echoing earlier
surveys. It showed 56 percent of Americans oppose the demolition. Only 28
percent support it.
Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., Kennedy, the list goes on:
Many presidents have taken turns remodeling one or another part of the
presidential grounds, often inciting political backlash. President Harry S.
Truman gutted and rebuilt much of the White House interior during the 1950s.
Today,
the White House may well need a larger ballroom for state dinners. Mr. Trump is
within his rights to replace the East Wing with one, although whether
demolition was required we may never know, because we now have only the word of
Mr. Trump, who called in the bulldozers before independent reviewers could
evaluate the scene.
His
administration has yet to release details for the ballroom. Its rising price
tag has now reached $300 million. The New York Times reported this week that
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is looking into undisclosed donations
after the Trump administration promised transparency.
As for
the design, we’ll see if it’s as banal as vague renderings suggest. But to
judge from a model of the proposed White House that the president displayed in
the Oval Office, the project would upend history, giving the lie to an
architectural metaphor that Americans have humble-bragged about for more than
200 years.
It’s part
of American lore that George Washington rebuffed proposals for a presidential
palace. He believed a fledgling democracy shouldn’t emulate Versailles. America
is not an imperial power like Britain. The White House is a representation in
sandstone and brick of an Everyman’s American dream.
Trading
Washington’s idealism for a Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac makes plain that we are
no longer that America — and that we haven’t been for a long time. Staging
state dinners in pop-up tents with portable heaters on the South Lawn, as
presidents have been doing for decades absent a bigger ballroom, played into an
architectural paradigm of a nation of equals.
But who
was it still fooling?
An
immense ballroom will tip the balanced, Neoclassical scales of the White House
toward architectural inequality and gilt. During Mr. Trump’s first term, I
wrote about his earlier executive order, from 2020, which demanded more
traditional, classical styles of architecture for federal buildings.
It
suggested that acanthus leaves and Ionic columns on courthouses and embassies
would better represent the popular taste and will of the American people. But
classicism is, at heart, about compositional poise, rationalism and proportion,
not columns.
For
decades, the United States has exercised its soft power around the world by
constructing diverse works of architecture, modernist and otherwise, which,
good and bad, told the world that America remained committed to innovation and
freedom.
The
Washington that Mr. Trump envisions leaving behind, with its luxuriant white
columns, marbled bathrooms, triumphal arch and giant gilded White House
ballroom, will tell another story about us.
In many
ways, it is who we already are.
A
correction was made on Nov. 8, 2025: An earlier version of this article
misidentified the structure that President Trump’s proposed arch would face. It
is the Lincoln Memorial, not the Jefferson Memorial.
When we
learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error,
please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Michael
Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and
editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global
challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries
and was previously chief art
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