Surprised Trump Is Destroying History? He Did The Same Thing Building Trump Tower.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s willingness to demolish history that gets in the way of his construction plans did not develop just recently with the destruction of the White House East Wing, but rather goes back decades to his building of Trump Tower in New York.

Trump destroyed two famous art deco friezes, reneging on a promise to preserve them, to avoid a slight delay in building his Midtown high-rise in 1980, offering a preview of the promise he made about building a massive ballroom on the South Lawn.

“It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it,” Trump said in July.

Those words wound up not having meaning, with the East Wing completely demolished by Thursday afternoon.

“We determined that after really a tremendous amount of study with some of the best architects in the world, we determined that really knocking it down, trying to use a little section ― you know, the East Wing was not much, it was not much left from the original,” he said in a rambling, disjointed answer to reporters in the White House Wednesday as he showed off an artist’s renderings. “It was a very small building. And rather than allowing that to hurt a very expensive, beautiful building that, frankly, they’ve been after for years. You have that. I brought these along, so people could see. But it’s ― you know, there’s a relative ― nobody’s actually seen anything quite like it. I think it’ll be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world.”

The co-author of one of Trump’s books with him, Charles Leerhsen, said Trump’s bait and switch should have been expected.

“I’m not at all surprised about him going back on his word about the East Wing. What would be surprising would be if he ever told the truth,” Leerhsen said.

The sequence of events is nearly identical to the destruction of a pair of Art Deco friezes adorning the Bonwit Teller department store building in 1980. The previous year, Trump had agreed to preserve the artwork when he tore down the Fifth Avenue structure he had purchased to make way for his planned Trump Tower building.

Instead of carefully removing the friezes and donating them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like he had said he would do, he had his work crews demolish them with jackhammers.

Trump then told The New York Times that preserving them would have added two weeks and $32,000 in costs ― $125,340 in today’s dollars — to the project. The friezes were “without artistic merit” and were not worth enough “to justify the effort to save them,” he said, using his fake “John Baron” persona.

Trump’s White House aides have downplayed the demolition of the East Wing, arguing that it is not historically significant because it was not part of the White House as originally built in 1800 and that other presidents have also done renovations over the years.

“There have been many presidents in the past who have made their mark on this beautiful White House complex. This briefing room, as you all know, was not once a briefing room. It was just a swimming pool,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during her briefing Thursday. “If you look at what President Truman did and some of the photos of the construction project that took place in those years, I think sitting here today, we’re all grateful for those efforts and the modifications that happened at that time.”

The work done by other presidents, however, was largely to make repairs and restorations, not destruction and replacement. President Barack Obama’s $376 million in White House projects, for example, were primarily to modernize sewer and telecommunications lines. Many of the items were recommendations coming from the commission that studied the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

And the East Wing, while not part of the original White House, was added by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, which means it had existed for 123 years out of the White House’s total 225-year history.

The demolition of a large part of the actual White House is the latest piece of Trump’s remaking of a historical government landmark according to his personal fashion. He had already paved over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden and replaced it with a patio and outdoor furniture that resemble that at a budget hotel. And he continues adding gold knick-knacks and decorations in the Oval Office, much as he did at his penthouse in Trump Tower.

CORRECTION: This story has been amended to correct the dollar amount of the White House renovations that occurred under Obama.