Here’s an amended transcript of the latest “Then and Now,” my short weekly chat with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer that tries to put current events in historical context:
Julian:
I’ve been working on a piece looking back at 1949 when President Truman and Congress started the process of reconstructing the interior of the White House. They did it at that time because it was clear the White House was in terrible shape and wasn’t safe. There were all kinds of stories about floor boards breaking, the walls not being stable, and it was clear that a big job had to be done.
Truman and Congress set up a bipartisan commission to think through how this could be done efficiently, and how to protect the integrity of the history of the building.
And then Truman monitors this as it happens between 1949 and 1952. He was very cognizant, as was the commission, to do as much as possible to restore the rooms to what they looked like— to even use material from the original building and really honor the White House as they were doing what was necessary.
The Truman family couldn’t live there because it was in such bad shape and needed to be gutted. The final cost was around $5.7 million. Congress had to approve a supplemental appropriation in the middle of this. And the Truman family had to move across the street to Blair House for three and a half years, from November of 1948 to May of 1952.
Jonathan Alter:
In all of the years since, almost every president has done some renovation or landscaping. So you have the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, which has now been destroyed. Michelle Obama planted a garden. You have a basketball court that Barack Obama put in, and a series of expensive structural renovations, most of them underground, that were approved by Congress when George W. Bush was president and completed under Obama.
Trump wasn’t the first to use private money. FDR did the same to build a swimming pool, which provided some relief from his polio. But unlike Trump’s project, the money didn’t come from major donors. It came in very small individual donations from readers of the New York Daily News, then the largest newspaper in the country. Nixon turned the swimming pool into what is now the White House press room.
So there have been modifications, and all until now have been OK. Even what Trump did to the Rose Garden, as offensive as it might have been, was within bounds of what presidents are entitled to do without congressional authorization.
This demolition to make way for a ballroom bigger than the rest of the White House is in an entirely different league. It is destroying part of the People’s House—after he promised that he wasn’t going to do anything to the White House proper. You can see Trump say it on tape And then, as happens so often, he shows the world that he’s a frickin’ liar, and he takes a wrecking ball to the East Wing.
For anybody who’s ever been there as a tourist or guest—and for millions who haven’t—this is heartbreaking. Trump is destroying part of history and our legacy, and the wrecking ball is a powerful metaphor for his presidency.
The photo of the demolition will live forever as an indelible image of Trump’s aggression against his own country. Garrett Epps has a terrific piece in The Washington Monthly arguing that Trump is a wartime president—and his enemy is us.
