Copyright independent
First Lady Melania Trump privately expressed disquiet about President Donald Trump’s plans to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for his lavish new ballroom, according to a report. The president’s wife “raised concerns about tearing down the East Wing” and “told associates it wasn’t her project” when she was asked about the drastic redevelopment, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed administration officials. The Independent has reached out to the White House for comment. Spokesperson Davis Ingle told the WSJ: “President Trump is a builder at heart. Make no mistake: the newly improved East Wing and brand new ballroom will make the People’s House more useful and beautiful for generations of presidents, and Americans, to come.” Trump’s latest luxury real estate undertaking, which could end up costing as much as $350 million by his own estimation, has caused widespread consternation over the last week, with many shocked by the sight of mounds of destroyed drywall, smashed windows, insulation, wires, rubble and debris piled on the lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania. Former First Lady Hillary Clinton, for one, took to X to bemoan the devastation, commenting: “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.” The current First Lady has made no public statement about the demolition of the wing, which has served as a base for presidential spouses since the Jimmy Carter administration, even though the work has meant upending her own team’s office space. Her silence is perhaps unsurprising, given that Melania has been an even more remote figure in her husband’s second term than in his first, spending just 14 of his first 100 days in Washington, D.C., according to The New York Times, preferring to be in New York City or Palm Beach. She has also downsized her staff this time around, reducing it to just five full-time members as of July. Her employees have been relocated amid the upheaval to other office space on the White House grounds while construction is ongoing, according to an official cited by CNN. The Office of the First Lady and the social office – which is responsible for major events at the White House – have been temporarily moved inside the executive mansion, divided among the Vermeil Room, the South Mezzanine, the Library, and the China Room, the official said. Other departments turfed out of the East Wing have been moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, including the White House Military Office, the calligraphers, the White House Visitors Office, and the Office of Legislative Affairs. “Watching the demolition is the physical embodiment of watching the first lady’s role become smaller and smaller,” First Women author Kate Andersen Brower has said in response to the project and Melania’s silence about it. “She’s making it clear that – like her husband – she’s not going to be like any other first lady... She doesn’t care about historic precedent, either.” MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown has warned that should the current arrangements become permanent, it would amount to “a regressive move that literally moves the Office of the First Lady away from the office and back into the home. It would at least be an on-brand decision from a White House that has rapidly rolled back decades of women’s rights and empowerment.” Trump himself has long nurtured dreams of erecting a 90,000-square-foot entertainment space at the White House and has raised funding from the likes of Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, T-Mobile, and the Union Pacific Railroad to help him realise it. His ambitions for the project go back to at least 2010, according to his predecessor Barack Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod, who recently recounted the moment he took a call from Trump that year, when the businessman was still best known as the host of NBC’s The Apprentice, offering to undertake construction. “He said, ‘You have these state dinners in s***y little tents,” Axelrod recalled. “He said, ‘I build ballrooms. I build the most beautiful ballrooms in the world. You can come to Florida and see for yourself.’ “I was thinking, we’re in the middle of a recession, I’m not sure about this,” the consultant continued, suggesting that Trump get in touch with Obama’s social secretary. This connection was ultimately never made.
