Satellite imagery shows that President Donald Trump’s destruction of the White House’s East Wing is even visible from space.
The images, captured by Planet Labs, show that Trump has now demolished the entire East Wing, erasing over a century of history in a flash.
Things do not look much better on the ground at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Gone is the East Wing’s iconic colonnade, the first family’s movie theater, public entrance, gift shop, the Office of the First Lady, and more—demolished with little notice from Trump, who previously vowed he would leave the White House untouched.
Trump, 79, has blown off critics who are peeved that he is razing historic offices and halls to make room for his grand ballroom. He has said that the East Wing “was never thought of as being much” and that it “was a very small building.”
The Trump administration has said the East Wing will be “modernized and rebuilt,” but has not shared any of its plans to revamp the space. Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom already has full renderings, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted Thursday that the president’s pet project is somehow his “main priority.”
The East Wing, constructed in 1902, was an integral part of the White House. Those who used to roam its halls have expressed horror that a president could destroy the space without listening to pleas to preserve it.
Trump feels differently about the destruction. He said that the sound from the neighboring West Wing of the East Wing’s demolition was “music to my ears.”
The oft-absent first lady, Melania Trump, has not spoken about losing her office in the wing’s razing, which has forced her and her staff—whose offices suffered the same fate—to relocate to the White House residence and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
There is no timetable as to when the supposedly modernized East Wing will reopen, or even when construction on such a project might begin.
The East Wing was the starting point for public tours of the White House. It was also where celebrities, dignitaries, and foreign leaders once entered the building for state dinners and other White House receptions.
Another stop on White House tours, which do not enter the West Wing, was the family theater. The theater has hosted movie nights for presidential families since the 1940s, as well as for celebrity guests like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who both attended a screening of The Pacific miniseries there with President Barack Obama in 2010. The theater, which even Trump has utilized, was demolished on Thursday.
All public tours of the White House—of which there are hundreds of thousands each year—have been paused “indefinitely,” making the so-called “People’s House” as inaccessible as it has ever been thanks to the Trump administration.
