Martin Cassella wrote:
The East Wing Obscenity Trump's Ballroom Is a Tumor On The People's House
Rick Wilson, October 22, 2025
There’s a way the light falls in the White House on autumn afternoons in Washington, thinning with the waning of the year, slanting, a dull gold the color of old parchment, that makes you feel you’ve slipped into a country where history isn’t past tense but a persistent whisper.
In the sad obscenity of the moment, one of the White House’s most beautiful spaces has been amputated, torn away from time and memory in an act of vulgar insult. The East Wing is lost now.
You once walked from the Visitors’ Foyer toward the East Wing, and the world narrowed to marble, glass, and the muffled hush of the People’s House breathing, working, constant and quiet.
It wasn’t grand in the old European sense; it was American grand, which is to say an old beauty, balanced and proper, perhaps a little improvised, a touch austere in places, and deeply intentional. It had the moral clarity of a church vestibule and, if you watched carefully, the workaday charm of a school hallway after the bell.
Generations of tourists and schoolkids and staffers honored to work there scuffed these floors. Marine sentries stooped to pick up a stray mitten and hand it back to a child who, only much later, would understand where she was.
The White House was never meant to be a palace, nor the Oval Office a throne room.
The East Wing was the living artery of the White House, the First Lady’s offices, the Social Office, the machinery of ceremonial democracy where symbolism gets translated into human scale. It’s where letters are answered and tours are staged; where holiday cards go from proofs to envelopes; where military families with tight smiles and damp eyes wait to meet a president who will say, “We remember.”
It was the workbench of the republic’s rituals, the place that once transformed policy into hospitality, power into presence, memory into history.
The first thing worth knowing is that the East Wing wasn’t always there; that is no defense of its obscene desecration today. Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 renovation gave us colonnades that linked the Residence to the outer offices, a balancing act of symmetry and purpose.
But the East Wing as we know it rose in 1942, a wartime facade to conceal the excavation of a bomb shelter beneath the lawn. We built gentility over fear; a classic American move, the practical architecture under the poised exterior. We added a Family Theater, because even during the worst of it, movies shaped our culture, the flickering consolation of stories in good times and bad.
The wing became a geography of grace notes: the East Garden that would later be coaxed into elegance by Jacqueline Kennedy; the corridor where photographs line up like a roll call of American life; the rooms that belong to prior First Ladies’ staffs, the keepers of continuity, the stewards of tone and memory. The current First Lady does not live or work in the White House except for brief, transactional appearances, and barely deserves the title.
Jacqueline Kennedy took the White House and made it an American cultural project without turning it into a museum. Her work wasn’t just about tables and fabrics; it was about the idea that the place mattered, that a nation with the existential threat of the bomb and a tide of trouble on the horizon also deserved elegance and art. Lady Bird Johnson gave us wildflowers and the conviction that beauty is public policy, too. Pat Nixon added to the collection with a practical eye, because good stewardship is rarely fashionable but always necessary. Rosalynn Carter welded compassion to competence.
Nancy Reagan wrapped it all in some theater, yes, but with a director’s sharp instinct for scene and consequence. Barbara Bush, in those kinder, gentler moments, welcomed those points of light to the East Wing. Hillary Clinton put a policy-nerd backbone into it; Laura Bush, a librarian’s quiet welcome to young readers. Michelle Obama threw the doors wide, cultivating White House gardens and kids’ health programs.
In every iteration, the East Wing kept the faith. It was the quiet liturgy of the American idea: welcome, steward, improve, and hand off to the next generation a little better and richer than before.
Then came our age of desecration, where every beloved historic treasure becomes a prop and every prop an instrument of power.
Donald Trump didn’t just misunderstand the East Wing; he loathes the category of things it represents.
He walked into a cathedral with a bullhorn, spray paint, and faux gold leaf. He saw a place designed for civic honor, official tenderness, and historical respect and wondered why it didn’t look more like a casino atrium, a glittery Liberace dreamscape.
The East Wing, under Melania Trump, became a mood board for grievance. The holiday corridors turned into a fever dream of performative menace, a pomo aesthetic that screamed more threat than holiday spirit. The Social Office, traditionally where protocol breathes, is now one more wing of the Department of Trolling, a conveyor belt of grotesque events staged not as acts of national hospitality but as moments for the Dear Leader to caper while his minions offer proofs of loyalty.
The White House grounds have become a gimcrack stage set, a regional dinner theater of the absurd.
It’s American malaise dressed up as blaring pageant: a stripper-pole segment added to a ballet, a spiritual emptiness that comes when a man confuses himself with a country and then tries to decorate the void in more and more gold leaf and Temu-grade gradeau.
There was, and still is, something transcendent about the White House, something balanced and quiet and stately. These are things Trump cannot abide. His vulgarity and transgression are a message that dignity and duty are for suckers; ego, payoffs, gilt ornaments and gaudy filigree are the sacrament.
And so the East Wing must be destroyed to make way for a grotesque carbuncle, a vile big-box Barbie Dream House ballroom so Trump can pack more in more paying sycophants per square foot.
I heard a particularly dumb take yesterday on this moment: the argument that Apple and Google and OpenAI and the other beggars at Trump’s feet are responsible for this.
It was a shallow and puerile excuse. They are, at best, symptoms, enablers, hollow men uttering the mantra of “shareholder value” to themselves.
This destruction, like all his other acts, is the pure, sole, personal responsibility of Donald John Trump, America’s most vile and vulgar president. Blaming the marks and the accommodationists is like saying Vichy France was responsible for the Holocaust.
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