Christine Flowers: He did WHAT to the East Wing?

“He did WHAT to the East Wing?”

If someone called me up at work and said “I knocked down half of your house, and will be installing a pool in your backyard as well as a gazebo at no charge to you,” I would be apoplectic. It’s not that I don’t like pools and gazebos. It’s that if I wanted one of either, I’d build it myself. The idea that a stranger would simply decide to “improve” my property without asking for permission is a violation of my privacy, not to mention trespass.

You probably see where I’m going with this. When President Trump announced this summer that he was going to build a ballroom, very few people took notice. That’s probably because he was doing so many other things, like meeting with Putin and sending immigrants to pleasant places like El Salvador and the Sudan, that a bit of interior/exterior decorating fell under the radar. Besides that, he promised that it wouldn’t encroach on the existing structure because, as he then stated, he loves the White House.

And then he started demolishing a huge chunk of it. I know that people will have different opinions about what happened when they started excavating Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden and dismantling Eisenhower’s portico. When I posted about it unfavorably on Facebook, there were literally hundreds of comments defending the actions. The spin was so vertiginous, I had to take Dramamine before responding.

First they said that he wasn’t “demolishing” the East Wing, just a small section of it. Then, when aerial footage showed that in fact, the East Wing was now a parking lot, defenders of the president pivoted in the most admirable way to teach us history lessons about Harry Truman and Barack Obama.

In the case of Truman, they mentioned the fact that he completely renovated the building right after World War II, which makes sense because it hadn’t been renovated in decades. We couldn’t do it sooner because we’d just spent a lot of money saving the free world. Upholstering chairs in the Oval Office were farther down on the list of essentials. They neglected to mention that he had asked Congress for permission, and funding.

As far as Obama was concerned, he repainted the lines on the tennis court so he and some friends could play basketball, and I think he may have also installed a bowling alley. None of these things involved men in construction helmets demolishing an entire wing of the building.

The thing that angered me most about the MAGA response to the renovation was not the fact that they were making excuses. It was that they were trying to gaslight us into believing that only Democrats and liberals were angered by the presumptuous acts of Donald Trump.

I am a Reagan conservative. I fought against same-sex marriage. I pray the rosary in front of abortion clinics and have given the keynote speech at several pro-life events. I have never voted for a Democrat for president, and I believe that the way we deal with Hamas is to hunt down every one and murder them in their beds. I heckle the protestors at the pro-Palestine marches.

And did I mention that I was 100 percent pro life? Oh yeah, I did.

My point is that it is not only liberals who are angry at what Trump has done. It is not only Democrats trying to use this as a political card against the president they cannot stand. There are a lot of us who are offended that this chief executive assumes that the White House is “his” house, just as he assumes that the DOJ is “his” DOJ and that he can sick ICE on whomsoever he pleases, regardless of due process.

On the other hand, I don’t hate the man. As I posted on social media, I don’t need to love Trump to agree with some of his acts, and I don’t need to hate him to criticize him. It’s like an á la carte buffet: I deal with him on a case-by-disgrace basis.

So trying to diminish and discount the anger that many Americans felt when they saw their house, our house, redesigned without our permission and without even an attempt to ask for Congressional oversight is annoying.

The usual suspects will always define every critique of the president as whining from the far Left. I know that it’s uncomfortable when someone from the right pushes back, but that’s tough.

I also find the argument that we “need” a ballroom to be a bit ridiculous. When Nancy Reagan was in the White House, she was widely viewed as an ostentatious Marie Antoinette, even though I loved her style. I’m trying to figure out how she managed to function in that hovel on the Potomac for eight years.

What’s done is done. What’s lost is lost. And we will all get over it, since there are more important things to discuss. But let’s not pretend that Trump did what Harry and Barry did. They asked if we wanted the pool. He just went in and started digging.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. Follow her on Twitter/X at @flowerlady61