The Left Is Having a Total Meltdown Over Trump’s White House Expansion

The White House is adding a ballroom and it’s basically the end of the world.

That’s been the media message the last few days as the Left has been in near hysterics about a much-needed expansion to the president’s mansion. I guess the government shutdown isn’t going quite as well as they thought.

“‘It’s your house. And he’s destroying it’: Trump demolishes White House East Wing” reads a headline from Politico.

“Trump is destroying the entire White House East Wing to feed his ego,” reads another headline on MSNBC.

This is, truly, one of the dumbest media-concocted “scandals” of the Trump era. And that’s saying a lot.

If the legacy media headlines are to be believed, Trump is demolishing the White House in a brazen act of diabolical demolition.

Not to be outdone, Democrats are sounding the alarm about what is surely the end of democracy, which has come to an end at least a dozen times since 2016.

Here is California Gov. Gavin Newsom who bravely dared to show the country this picture of construction taking place next to the White House. Oh, excuse me, a picture of Trump “literally destroying the White House.”

What a monster! Trump is finishing the job the British started in the War of 1812! The ghost of Abigail Adams weeps!

In case you got this far and bought into these obviously absurd takes, here’s the skinny about what’s really happening.

The White House is fairly modestly sized for the mansion of the head of state. The president in the American system must perform the political and ceremonial functions that come with that job, as is tradition handed down by President George Washington.

That means that the president must hold state dinners and other such things as a matter of regular diplomacy. The current space in the East Room of the White House can only fit 200 people. This has occasionally caused challenges when the president has hosted larger events, as the White House explained in a statement in July.

The statement isn’t just some kind of spin. In 2009, President Barack Obama held a large, 350-person event for the Indian prime minister. It had to be moved to a temporary tented space on the South Lawn to accommodate all the guests, which turned problematic—and diplomatically embarrassing—when it rained.

So, the White House expansion makes practical sense. It’s not even being done with taxpayer money as Trump said that it’s being paid for with his own money and private donations. Further, what’s being removed isn’t very large at all when considering the overall size of the White House complex.

To top this all off, it must be noted that modifications and expansions to the White House have a long presidential tradition.

The building had to be almost entirely rebuilt after the British burned it to the ground in the aforementioned War of 1812.

Chester A. Arthur, one of the bearded nothings of the Gilded Age (OK, that’s probably unfair but I’m guessing most Americans couldn’t pick him out of a lineup), had the slightly more famous Louis Comfort Tiffany lavishly redesign many of the White House rooms in 1884.

The 20th century brought constant changes.

Theodore Roosevelt remodeled and “modernized” most of the building not long after Arthur’s redecoration, in 1902. Roosevelt wanted the president’s mansion to be less frilly, more in line with America’s early republican simplicity.

William Taft added the now famous Oval Office in 1909. Franklin D. Roosevelt put in a swimming pool in 1933. Richard Nixon built a bowling alley in the basement in 1973.

Harry Truman basically gutted the White House in the early 1950s at great taxpayer expense.

Even Obama made some major White House renovations. He had a tennis court changed to a basketball court. But he went even further than that.

Funny enough, an old CNN segment dug up on social media shows the news network enthusiastically covering the $376 million Obama renovation in 2010.

Notice how differently CNN covered Trump’s renovation compared to Obama’s.

So, this whole story is really much ado about nothing. The people squawking about this were among those who just a few years ago openly celebrated the destruction of history and architecture in the name of political correctness. It’s rich for them to scream bloody murder about our “sacred” buildings now.

The criticism is far from serious, but I think there is actually something more to the leftwing freak out over the White House expansion than just the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome. As writer Mark Hemingway pointed out on X, what is really eating away at them is that there will now be a permanent reminder in the future that Trump was president.

That this president is putting his mark on history and making physical changes to the White House that they perhaps thought they would never lose after 2020 is too much to bear.

Hence the wailing and gnashing of teeth over something that would normally only interest architectural enthusiasts and Washington tourists.

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