On Wednesday, Fox News defended President Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing, pointing to minor changes President Barack Obama made to turn a tennis court into a basketball court while he was in office.
Trump has come under fire from prominent Democrats and preservationists for the massive construction project. To rebut these complaints, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy argued that Trump’s gaudy ballroom project is in line with other presidents’ modifications.
“In 2009, President Obama added a basketball court,” Doocy said, citing similar minor renovations to the White House, like Theodore Roosevelt’s construction of the West Wing and Franklin Roosevelt’s addition of a swimming pool.
The Fox report was effectively a cut-and-paste regurgitation of the White House’s own spin, specifically a document released Tuesday complaining about “the latest instance of manufactured outrage” and “unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies” purportedly “clutching their pearls.”
The document also cites Obama’s basketball court and other projects illustrated by Fox.
But the narrative pushed by Fox and the White House is a complete exaggeration. Obama made minor modifications to an existing tennis court to add a basketball hoop. The court was then used for various events, including games with wounded military veterans.
It was nothing like Trump’s massive destruction of the East Wing.
“They’re wrecking it,” Towson University political science professor emeritus Martha Joynt Kumar told the Washington Post. “These are changes that can’t be undone. They’re destroying that history forever.”
The nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation sent a letter to the National Park Service on Tuesday, lamenting the changes and calling for a pause to Trump’s actions.
“While the National Trust acknowledges the utility of a larger meeting space at the White House, we are deeply concerned that the massing and height of the proposed new construction will overwhelm the White House itself—it is 55,000 square feet—and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House with its two smaller, and lower, East and West Wings,” the letter said.
Of course, there was never a letter like this sent in opposition to Obama’s basketball hoop.
The East Wing destruction comes a few months after Trump paved over the historic Rose Garden, turning it into a gathering spot for wealthy donors reminiscent of his Mar-a-Lago property.
Republicans have gone along with Trump’s radical changes to the White House, which is very different from 2001, when they were so mad for supposed destruction of White House property by the Clinton team—a prank involving the removal of a few “W” keys from keyboards to mess with President George W. Bush—that a federal investigation was launched into the matter.
But now as White House walls crumble and fall, Republicans remain silent—as do their propaganda allies at Fox.
