Extreme Makeover: White House Edition

0:00The latest thing dividing Americans is President Trump's$300 million or so dollar ballroom. Nobody's actually seen anything quite like it. I think it'll be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world. 53 % of Americans polled disapprove, a quarter say go for it, and a quarter aren't sure. So he's not using any taxpayer money. But the donated funds are coming from unsettling corporations like Palantir and unsettling individuals like the Winklevii. He tore down the entire East Wing. But the White House was having parties in tents on the lawn for lack of a real ballroom. It's ugly. That's subjective.

0:41It's the people's house. And the people voted for Donald Trump. Today on Today Explained, Demolition Man.

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2:22I mean, I see this. I like it. It's so incredible. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Boom. Okay. Pshing, boom. I'm Dan Diamond, a White House reporter at The Washington Post. Out of curiosity, is covering the White House normally about actually covering the White House? I just realized, normally, are you reporting on things other than the building? I'm usually covering the people and the policy and not the upholstery. But I think part of the beat is the actual building. And that was the story this past week. Perfect. Okay, great. OK, so at the moment, as we speak, the East Wing of the White House is basically a pile of rubble.

3:05President Trump's massive demolition of the East Wing is now complete. Now that East Wing, with all the history it contained, is gone. Reduced to rubble to make way for President Trump's new ballroom. Before this week, last week, what was the East Wing of the White House for? The East Wing was the entrance for lots of visitors who made their way to the White House. If you went to a Christmas party at the White House the past number of years, you probably went in through the East Wing. If you were visiting the First Lady's office, that was located in the East Wing. There was a movie theater that the president would sometimes screen special films in.

3:41So it was not as glamorous as the West Wing, but it was an important part of the White House, and it had been part of the White House for decades. So the fact that it is now rubble is a very big change. It sounds like maybe some of the softer aspects of White House life were the East Wing's responsibility. That's right. And sometimes to the detriment of staff who ended up in the East Wing. I was talking to Tevi Troy, a historian about this over the weekend, who made the point that I think it was during the Kennedy administration, there was a fight between some Kennedy staffers and they were mocking the East Wing folks as they were only in the East Wing.

4:13That was the more feminine side of the White House with Jackie Kennedy. So it was a little bit of machismo and not as prestigious as being in the West Wing. But again, it's still the White House and it was a major part of the White House these past years. All right. So we will have a new East Wing. What's it going to look like? What are the plans here? Well, I wish I could tell you, Noel. I think at this point, as we're talking, Monday, October 27th, we still have not seen formal plans. We've seen some renderings that President Trump has shared and the White House put out on a website. But we don't know exactly what the East Wing is going to look like.

4:47For the past week, we've been asking, will it be rebuilt? What will it contain? What will this ballroom that the president wants actually look like in practice? And there are still no formal plans, which is very unusual, if not unprecedented, for a major White House plan like this to go ahead with demolishing part of the building without letting us know what's going to replace it. Can you tell me a little bit about the renderings? Like, what do we know? So President Trump has spoken all year about his desire for a ballroom at the White House. I build beautiful ballrooms, and I actually offered to build a ballroom for the White House.

5:20I was going to build it right there. This was going to be the reception room. And then I was going to build a beautiful, beautiful ballroom like I have at Mar-a-Lago. And frankly, he's spoken about this for more than this year. It goes all the way back to the first Obama administration. David Axelrod, an advisor to President Obama, has said that President Trump, then Donald Trump, the builder, called and pitched him in 2010 on building a ballroom. So we know that he has wanted to do this for a long time. And the renderings look very much like a Trump resort. I'm not an expert in ballrooms, Noel.

5:50Perhaps there's an architectural eye that would be able to distinguish between this ballroom and, say, the Mar-a-Lago ballroom or the ballroom that President Trump has at his resort at Turnberry, Scotland. But they're all kind of evocative of each other. Lots of gold, high ceilings, big windows. Nice as ballrooms go, but again, a major project on the campus of the White House that we still haven't seen formal plans for. And normally it would go through a review process before this kind of project began. And remind me, how many square feet are we talking about here? Well, President Trump has said it's going to be 90 ,000 square feet, which is significant.

6:25The White House residence, that main building, is 55 ,000 square feet. So we're talking about an addition that would effectively double the size of the White House. But it's hard to say, Noel, exactly how big it is and what it's going to look like because President Trump has changed repeatedly the capacity of the ballroom, for instance. He said it was going to be 650 people. Now he's saying it's going to be about 1 ,000. He said it would be a$200 million project. He's steadily raised that now to$300 million. So it seems like things are in flux, and what might have been the size of the White House ballroom might not be what it ends up being.

6:56Is the president allowed to just do this? I think what President Trump has showed us, not just with this ballroom, but with many things this year, is whether or not he's allowed, he's going to do it. And in this case, there was a loophole, it appears, on demolishing parts of the White House campus. Yes. Normally, a president would go through the process of seeking review and approval from several commissions that help guide historic development on the White House grounds. And that kind of work meant waiting, usually, to demolish things before you got approval to go ahead. President Trump and his team realized, and apparently this is legal, that they could just demolish something.

7:37The building may still have to wait for approval, but the demolishing the president could do. Okay, so let's talk about the case that the White House is making for this. In a news release, the White House said the ballroom will be, quote, a bold, necessary addition. How's the administration making the case for this addition? So what the White House has said, and there is some truth to this, that presidents have long needed an event space to host major VIPs, to have something that is indoors rather than the tent that is sometimes set up when the White House wants to have hundreds of people on the grounds.

8:15And coming to you from Washington, D.C., the weather in Washington, D.C. can be fickle. There have been outdoor events that have been skewed or somewhat ruined because of the bad weather here. So there's absolutely truth to the value that the White House could use more event space, and the White House itself is small and cramped in ways that don't always come through on television. What the president and his team are also arguing is that he's a builder who knows how to do this well and better than anybody else. I have an advantage. I was a really good real estate developer. So I know how to get things done.

8:46I know how to build it. You'll see it in a minute when you look at the ballroom, which I built at Mar-a-Lago. I think that's what in the eye of the beholder, if you've seen the Trump constructions around the world. But it has raised the question of what exactly is the president going to build and why can't this go through a review process before he starts to build it? But that's part of their argument, too. And I think the president is also very proud, he says, of the fact that this is going to be paid for by donors, that there are about$350 million in private donations, he has said, to cover the cost so there will be nothing to the taxpayer.

9:18The president has said he's going to pay out of pocket, too. I'm not going to ask the government for money. I'll fund it, and I'm sure we'll have some donations to it. But it's not an inexpensive thing. It'll cost a lot of money. Now, on the one hand, there's polling that shows Americans do prefer that. They don't want to pay for White House renovations. But on the other, it raises serious questions about what are the donors hoping to get? We have seen an administration that has played favorites, that has bent the rule of law in many cases. So if you're donating to the president's personal priority, what are you expecting to get on the other side?

9:54Hey, what do we know about the donors? Who is paying for this? The list that the White House gave out last week is about 35, 37 companies and individuals. There are some companies that are quite familiar. Amazon, who was founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. Palantir, a major contractor here in D.C. Lockheed Martin, Google, Comcast. I mean, big, big companies and many companies that have business in front of the administration. And then there are individuals like the Winklevoss brothers, who are cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. There's Stephen Schwartzman, a wealthy individual who has been a long time Republican donor and is close to the administration.

10:34So folks of that nature and companies that are significant and, again, have dealings in front of this administration. It's not taxpayer dollars, though. And one of the defenses I've heard from White House adjacent people is, hey, you're not paying for it. And again, there is evidence that Americans support that part of this project. The polling overall has been pretty bad that slightly more than half of Americans don't approve the decision to demolish part of the White House. Many are against the idea of a ballroom. This is a part of our history. And one individual made those decisions with no input and no opportunity for the people's house to have the input of the people.

11:17It's a desecration, really, I think. But there is polling that shows Americans generally favor the idea that this would be funded by donors and not by taxpayers. The money's coming out of his pocket and other people's pockets, not the taxpayers. So that's all I care about. I saw some YouGov polling on this last week where about 52 percent of adults said these renovations should be paid for by private donors to save taxpayers money versus 19 percent who said it should be paid for by taxpayers. So this actually is something that is falling in the White House favor when so much over the past week has not.

11:53How does this renovation of the East Wing or this rebuilding of the East Wing, how does that compare to the other changes that President Trump has brought to the White House, physical changes? Well, in some ways, Noel, they're of a piece. I was thinking about this last week when we broke the story that Trump was tearing down the East Wing. And I was thinking about all the other things he's done to the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the putting gold in the Oval Office, where I've been a couple times for work, and it looks like something out of Mar-a-Lago or Versailles. I mean, there's so much gold in there now, it's significantly different.

12:25These are all things that President Trump would have done at one of his own resorts. And ballrooms and the Rose Garden Club, which is his name for the newly paved over Rose Garden, I mean, that's what you would expect at a Trump resort. So that all kind of is of a piece. I think more broadly, Trump has bulldozed the federal government in many ways. And that's probably why this story took off so much. It was a metaphor for so many things that President Trump has tried to do, where he goes ahead and makes his changes and consequences be damned. And lots of Americans are understandably confused or even upset to see part of the White House come down so quickly.

13:11Dan Diamond of The Washington Post. He covers the White House. Coming up, our ballrooms, ourselves. What the president's plans tell us about us?

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15:33You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back. Debbie Millman hosts the show Design Matters. She's an author, an educator at the School of Visual Arts, and a designer herself. And Debbie, your gut reaction to the new ballroom? Oh, my gut reaction is one of heartbreak. it's really sad to see what's happening to see the demolition to see this historic wing of the White House demolished he's essentially done this on his own without any input or counsel from preservationists or historians if you go to the White House website they very craftily put up a historical list of other renovations that have occurred.

16:25But those were always done with historians, preservationists, architects that were quite open about what was being done with blueprints and so forth. And so it's a little bit of a game of hide and seek here. Your response to people who say that you haven't been transparent enough about this? I haven't been transparent enough? That some of your critics feel it. I've shown this to everybody that would listen. But it's really smoke and mirrors. There are no floor plans that have been shared. There's a couple of sort of nondescript drawings that have been shared, but don't in any way feature what's happening on the inside of the building and more than just a footprint.

17:08President Trump is not known for his restraint, right? He likes things big. He likes them gold. He likes things that some people might call tacky or gaudy. If you kind of look at what Americans are saying about this remodel, some people see those visual choices as representative of prosperity, as representative of success. Like one man's tacky is another man's, hey, that's gorgeous. Is there an argument here that, you know, the people's house should reflect the guy that the people elected? Because that reflects us as well. The answer to that is very much about what you believe to be true about representation.

17:56Those that do see it representing prosperity, that certainly can be aspirational, but that's not the status of most Americans. This is the people's house. It's not one person's house. And what Mr. Trump is doing is creating a castle or palace. It's gotten great reviews. President Trump has long treated architecture as his tool of identity, as has his father in 1966. Excellent, fantastic, unbelievable. He tore down a 19th century amusement park in Coney Island and promised that he would preserve some of the historical elements. But they didn't. Instead, they threw a party at the demo site, believe it or not.

18:45There were bikini-clad hard hat-wearing models. And Fred Trump handed out bricks for people to throw at the glass front of the historic pavilion there to dismantle and destroy it, as opposed to preserve it for historical purposes. And then Trump followed suit in 1980. He demolished the Bronwood Teller building on Fifth Avenue to be able to make way for Trump Tower. And he promised the limestone art deco reliefs to the Met, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he destroyed them. He was in a lot of trouble in the city. He was in the headlines every day. New York City Trump's developer smashes panels.

19:39And when asked about that later, he shrugged his shoulders and provided a sense of disdain for them as opposed to respect. This is not something that he hasn't done before. And it shows a lack of respect for history. It shows a lack of respect for preserving artifacts that have value and meaning to create something that is benefiting only really himself. You know, I don't know much about the history of the White House, but I have to assume that President Trump isn't the first president to kind of tinker with the place. I mean, these are generally men with big egos who see themselves as big leaders.

20:26What's been done in the past and is what Trump is doing that much different? Well, the new ballroom is estimated at 90 ,000 square feet. It is not the first intervention in the White House by a long shot. Thomas Jefferson expanded the grounds. He created gardens that reflected his ideals. Franklin Roosevelt relocated the Oval Office to the southeast corner of the West Wing. But at the time, the existing office was rather dark, rather cramped. And so he brought a lot of light and accessibility to the office. Harry Truman oversaw the reconstruction of the interior. When President Harry S. Truman and Mrs.

21:11Truman came to live in the White House, it had seen almost a century and a half of hard use. But a lot of that was because of what seemed to be imminent collapse of parts of the building that were so unsafe that there was really no other recourse but to do that. Of course, Jacqueline Kennedy. I have a committee which has museum experts and government people and private citizens on it. And then everything we do is subject to approval by the Fine Arts Committee. Her restoration project in general emphasized historical continuity. She also obviously created the Rose Garden. She did a lot to the grounds, all of which had been demolished.

21:55So this is not the first destruction of pieces of the White House that Trump wants to remake as his own for primarily celebratory or party reasons as opposed to reasons that reflect more safety or preservation or augmentation for the people as opposed to billionaire donors. All right. So other presidents have changed the White House, but you're saying this sort of belies comparison. If there's no real comparison in the U.S., are there comparisons elsewhere, other world leaders who have done this sort of thing? Oh, my gosh, yes. Louis XIV's vision for the design of Versailles transformed what was a royal residence into a stage on which his reign would be essentially performed.

22:53And Benito Mussolini's marble piazzas sought to tie fascism to Rome's magnificence. From high balcony, Italy's idol looks down on his admirers, and the smile on his face is the smile of a man who is sure. In the process, entire neighborhoods were demolished to create the boulevards of the imperiali. In Versailles, in fascist Rome, architecture was created to extend the power of a leader by rewriting the meaning of the nation's most visible symbols. And essentially, that is what Trump is doing here. It's not a practical addition. It's a metaphor for the Trump brand overtaking the institution. Now, there's no question that there will be value to a ballroom.

23:40The current ballroom holds, I think, about 250 people. When the White House has hosted bigger parties, they've had to erect tents on the grounds. And that was not always a feasible or comfortable situation. If it was raining, people had to walk on plastic. But that doesn't mean we need to have the over-the-top showpiece that does not reflect the soul of this country. The soul of this country is not gilded flourishes. It's just not. Those examples that you shared, there's some monarchy in there. There's some dictator slash fascism in there. You're an expert, right? You're an expert in your field.

24:28And President Trump has done this thing in America that's very interesting, which he's cast a lot of doubt on experts in favor of regular people, ordinary folk. And I think what he might say is, I was democratically elected by the ordinary folk. I have those regular people on my side. And if I choose to remake the White House in my image or the image of something else, that's what ordinary Americans voted for. Madam Expert, what do you think about that argument? Well, this is not a reflection of or for the people. The ballroom will re-script the White House as an extension of the Trump brand. And the fact that this has been funded by and hosted for billionaires in exchange for recognition of their own brands as part of this really refutes that statement, in my opinion.

25:30One of the great tenets of a brand is, can you remove the logo and still identify what it is? Do these iconic assets speak to you beyond the name of the brand? And the current building will be reshaped in the image of President Trump. It will be defined by over-the-top opulence, truly exaggerated and cumbersome scale. And it's a preference, it shows a preference for size over substance and size over subtlety and size over dignity. It will challenge the integrity of the existing architecture of the White House in ways we can't even envision yet. And I think it's converting what is considered to be and has always been considered to be and described as the House of the People into a stage for Trump's personal aggrandizement.