The Crazy-Making Destruction of the East Wing of the White House

In 2014 I promised my daughter I’d wrangle an invite to a White House Christmas party. A friend texted a friend, no favors were exchanged, and Nora and I got to show up at the gorgeous East Wing entrance, where millions of official guests and ordinary Americans over the decades have gotten a chance to visit “the people’s house.” I’m not easily awed, but this was awesome. We were greeted by animatronic versions of President Obama’s dogs, Bo and Sunny, umpteen gorgeously decorated Christmas trees along the paneled walls of the visitors’ lobby, and decorations on the theme of “A Child’s Vision of Christmas.” Bo and Sunny cookies were served.

We no longer have dogs in the East Wing–Trump, notably, has no pets–and we no longer have an East Wing, either. In the dead of Monday night, with little warning, construction crews began to destroy the iconic structure, added 123 years ago. In addition to the visitors’ lobby and grand colonnade, the wing housed the operations of the First Lady and her offices.  First Lady Betty Ford is said to have remarked “If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.” Fittingly, Melania Trump gave up her office, from which she planned the hideous Christmas desecration of 2018, featuring rows of blood-red trees who looked like characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It has since been turned into a gift-wrapping room.

This is my uber-privileged way of explaining why my heart felt broken by the devastation of the East Wing. But I think I’d feel this way even if I’d never been inside. Photos of the demolition made it look like the building had been attacked by a terrorist or a foreign enemy. And I couldn’t help but connect it to the fact that seven million Americans turned out to protest Trump and his politics at No Kings rallies around the country just days before. He turned around and, with no permission or review, immediately destroyed “the people’s entrance” to the people’s house. There is no better symbol of his presidency to date. On Thursday high wooden walls and fencing were erected to keep the desecration from the public eye. People kept trying to see it anyway. I ran into CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who was “trying to get a look for myself,” but he was too late. The destruction would have made the late al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden smile; the destruction of the Pentagon wrought by one of his planes on September 11, 2001, seems small by comparison.

At the same time as television stations broadcast pictures of the gaping wound in the White House, they delivered other destabilizing and stomach-turning sights. Masked and armed ICE and Border Patrol officers are conducting increasingly brutal military operations in America’s streets. A new attack came on Manhattan’s Canal Street, where ICE cracked down on mainly African vendors, many undocumented, who are known to peddle their wares in the heart of the city’s Chinatown. We are seeing people who resist, some of them citizens, brutally thrown to the ground and handcuffed, then detained, some of them indefinitely.

All of these images, from the disfigured White House to the weapons of war terrorizing Americans on our city streets, are psychologically destabilizing–and they are intended to be. Trump wants us to feel powerless and under siege.

But it’s not scaring everyone. As I walked around to the White House South Lawn, dozens of tourists were taking photos. I thought from a distance that perhaps one could get a better view of the carnage from there. But no, they had a pristine, postcard image of the White House, with no ugly destruction visible from that vantage point, and they were snapping selfies and photos. I asked one group if they had any idea Trump had just torn up a third of the historic structure they’d come to ogle; they looked at me like I was crazy. Which I was, a little, I guess. A Black man out there hawking MAGA hats told me I was making a big deal out of nothing–Trump would build a ballroom “twice as great,” and it would be paid for by friends like “P. Diddy,” referring the Sean Combs, recently convicted on two counts of “transportation to engage in prostitution” and sentenced to 50 months in prison, “when he gets out.”  The salesman must believe the rumors that Trump is pondering a pardon for his ally Combs.

In the end I couldn’t resent tourists (except those who bought MAGA hats) for snapping pretty pictures. Many probably planned their visits before the government shutdown, and now they’ve come to this city of grand museums and monuments which are mostly closed. One young man followed me to ask if what I’d told them about the destruction was true. “That sounds crazy,” he said, when I told him yes. It does sound crazy, and it’s part of a plan to make Trump opponents feel crazy. We have to resist that feeling while taking in just how ugly our country is becoming.