American Battleground: Demolition Man – How Trump’s first year back is changing the nation’s capital
- - American Battleground: Demolition Man – How Trump’s first year back is changing the nation’s capital
Tom Foreman, CNNJanuary 18, 2026 at 7:01 AM
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Photo Illustration by Ian Berry/CNN/Getty Images/Adobe Stock
On a breezy autumn morning beneath skittering clouds, the demolition crew strikes quicker than almost anyone expected.
Working at the behest of President Donald J. Trump, who has long fashioned himself the builder-in-chief, they take only days to reduce the 123-year-old East Wing of the White House to rubble. No drawn-out debate. No approval by independent preservationists.
The splintering of wood is also the sound of Trump breaking a promise in the eyes of some observers. Musing two months earlier about putting a palatial ballroom on the White House grounds, he had insisted, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it, but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m a big fan of.”
Now there is only the debris left by a president willing to treat the People’s House like his private property, with critics howling, courts being asked to stop the project and the estimated cost climbing from $200 million to $400 million.
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The White House argues that private donors will pay for it all, that the traditional home of the first lady’s office was in terrible shape and that a permanent ballroom is desperately needed if only to retire the tents that sprout like mushrooms during some of the largest presidential soirees. Party planners on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that need.
But political insiders goggle at the proposed size. “This is going to be probably the finest ballroom ever built,” Trump boasts of a project set to be nearly 90,000 square feet and as tall as a four-story building. The size has fluctuated but the initial plan calls for something big enough to dwarf the main White House structure.
“It feels like the whole story of his goddamn term,” author and social commentator Robert Arnold complains in an online video about the East Wing demolition, “break it, sell it, lie about it, blame the press, move on before the dust settles.”
And for anyone who argues that Trump’s heavy-handed, go-it-alone approach is a far cry from the cooperative, transparent White House makeovers by past presidents, Republicans on Capitol Hill are ready with sharp replies. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley points to the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers. “They didn’t have any concern for history then,” he sneers at the president’s critics. “Now, all of a sudden, the façade of the East Wing is iconic. Give me a break.”
From the moment Trump began his second term, he has wanted to leave his unique stamp on the White House. He paved the Rose Garden to look like a Mar-a-Lago patio and raised massive flagpoles on the North and South lawns, making the odd declaration that they are “the best poles anywhere in the country, or in the world actually.” He installed marble and gold fixtures in the bathroom of the Lincoln Bedroom, and encrusted the Oval Office in shiny hardware, declaring, “There is nothing like gold and there’s nothing like solid gold.”
Waiters work on preparations for a dinner hosted by Trump on the newly renovated Rose Garden patio, at the White House in Washington, DC, on September 5. - Brian Snyder/Reuters
Other changes were more political — and dovetailed with a perception of retribution in Trump’s second term. In a long line of presidential photos hung along an exterior White House corridor, Trump’s team installed plaques heaping insults on Democrats, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, whose photo shows not the 46th president but an autopen. The caption calls Biden, who beat Trump in 2020, “the worst President in American History.”
But Trump’s ambitions to change the landscape have gone far beyond the place where he lives.
Under executive order, the Smithsonian Institution began a vigorous review aimed at ditching “divisive or partisan narratives” in the institute’s many museums and pushing “American exceptionalism.” Trump’s budget cuts hammered the United States Institute of Peace, an independent agency funded by Congress to promote global conflict resolution — and then the White House renamed it the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”
Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by dumping board members appointed by Biden and handpicking their replacements.
Those folks, in turn, elected Trump — who never attended the center’s gala during his first term — as their chairman. Under Trump’s newfound interest, the center quickly disavowed any interest in “woke” programming or “anti-American propaganda.” The artistic community responded in kind. A touring company of “Hamilton” was among the shows that were canceled. The American College Theatre Festival ended its nearly 60-year relationship with the center. The Washington National Opera split too. Some blamed their departures on Trump creating what they considered an artistically toxic atmosphere, and others demurred to the economy, marketing concerns and more.
Undeterred, Trump chose to host the Kennedy Center Honors himself and his board voted to rename the building too, over the objections of the Kennedy family. The sign out front now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
On it goes. Trump’s face is now emblazoned on some national park passes, sparking disapproving hikers to market stickers and cardboard sleeves to cover him up. A one-dollar Trump coin has been designed, while a group of GOP lawmakers has rumbled about putting Trump on a $250 bill. Another Republican proposal is to rename Washington Dulles International Airport for the billionaire chief executive. Each of these initiatives has brought storms of complaints and demands for legislative or legal intervention.
When gigantic pictures of Trump appeared above DC streets, Democrats were incensed. “When I saw the banners hanging from federal office buildings … it reminded me of (the) Communist Party in China,” said Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia. “It’s another indication of the march that we’re on towards authoritarianism in this country.”
Workers hang a large photo of President Donald Trump from the top of the Department of Labor headquarters in Washington, DC, on August 27, 2025. - Drew Angerer/AFP/Getty Images
Some of Trump’s ideas are not particularly new. He has returned to a first-term architectural theme, commanding that government buildings should adhere to classical styles and “uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States.”
For some traditional conservatives, including CNN political commentator Shermichael Singleton, that’s fine. “If the aim of the president is to say we’re going to move away from brutalist aesthetics and move back toward a return of Roman-Greco architecture,” he says, “I would absolutely be in support of that.”
Yet, in the same breath, Singleton raises a potential political danger to Trump’s inclination to paint the town in his own likeness, before he calms American anxieties about the economy.
“When (voters) are economically secure, when they believe the country is secure, when they believe the future prospects for their children and grandchildren are better … people will applaud you for building all the statues that you want,” Singleton says. But, he adds, when large questions are looming over the lives of average Americans, “people may not be so willing to be supportive.”
In other words, with Trump’s public approval rating down, worry about the economy up, agitation over immigration raids, international clashes and the lingering angst over the Epstein files, this might be a poor time for wrapping your office in gold, building a dance hall inspired by Versailles and hosting dinners with your fellow billionaires while telling struggling voters that questions about affordability are a “hoax.”
Democratic lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are carrying the message they want voters to hear in the critical 2026 midterm elections. “It shows that Donald Trump is not focused on fixing health care but rather on vanity projects … that don’t do anything to benefit the American people. They only benefit Trump and his ego.”
Still, Trump’s actions to remake DC have largely drawn praise from his base, and there is no sign he is easing up. Recently, the National Portrait Gallery’s “American Presidents” exhibition saw the removal of references to his two impeachments and the MAGA-inspired January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. Curators say they are merely experimenting with more minimalist tags. But a reference to former President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal and impeachment remains on display, leaving presidential historian Tim Naftali unsatisfied with the gallery’s claim. “The public deserves to have explanations before things are removed,” he told CNN. “You don’t just remove something and leave a gap … that’s what the Soviets did.”
A photograph of President Donald Trump and a short plaque next to it are on display at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery's "American Presidents" exhibit on January 11 in Washington, DC. - Rod Lamkey/AP
Then there is the arch.
Imagine an American version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. Based on models that Trump likes to show off, he has been keen on building such a thing for quite some time.
“He came up with the design and has been part of the process every step of the way,” a senior White House official told CNN.
Ostensibly, the arch is to celebrate the 250th birthday of the founding of the United States. But when Trump was asked by a reporter who the arch was for, the president pointed to himself and said, “Me.”
Certainly, plenty of presidents have had public symbols raised to their accomplishments. But typically, such honors are bestowed long after chief executives are out of office, most often years after they have died, and at the urging of others who admired their work. Trump stands virtually alone in seeking to fashion such laurels for his own head, even as he continues to say much of it will be privately funded.
But because Trump has done so much of this on his own authority without seeking cooperation or any sort of approval from others, it is fully possible a future president could just as quickly erase it all. Trump’s name could be scraped from the performing arts center. Any currency bearing his likeness could be withdrawn from circulation. The gold could be pried from the Oval Office. Even Trump’s beloved ballroom could be stripped of all references to him.
And unless his legacy is strong enough to sustain Republican support as he slides into lame-duck land, there could be few allies willing or able to defend the honors he has raised to himself.
The White House Ballroom construction project behind Vice President JD Vance, President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, during a meeting with oil executives in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 9. - Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
But Trump is unfazed. At a recent White House meeting with oil executives on Venezuela, Trump startled the assemblage by unexpectedly rising from the table and walking to a window.
Looking at the bulldozed site where the East Wing once stood and where he hopes his ballroom will rise, he said, “I don’t think there will be anything like it in the world.”
One way or the other, he may be right.
AMERICAN BATTLEGROUND is an ongoing CNN series about the impact of the Trump administration on politics and culture.
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