Trump Demolishes Part of White House as He Builds His Tacky Ballroom

President Donald Trump said his new 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building.” But footage from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Monday afternoon shows a crew tearing down the facade of the East Wing to make way for the garish structure.

An image obtained by The Washington Post shows a construction machine dismantling the side of the East Wing, which was added in 1942. Collapsed walls can be seen in the photograph, as can exposed rebar, with windows lying in a pile of debris on the ground.

As McClatchy White House correspondent Emily Goodin reported on X: “Bulldozers are taking down the façade and parts of the roof now. Windows have been removed. Trees were seen being taken from the property,” and the “area is fenced off and closed to staff.”

Asked in July about the possibility of East Wing demolition for the ballroom’s construction, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt answered, quite vaguely, that the wing would “be modernized” and “the necessary construction will take place.” Leavitt also said East Wing offices—including that of the first lady, the White House Military Office, and the visitors office—would be “temporarily relocated” while it is “being modernized.”

Observers online were shocked by this manifestation of Trump’s apparent belief that, as president, he owns “the People’s House”—to say nothing of other American institutions he’s sought to reshape (most in a less physical sense) to his liking.

“So any president can just start destroying portions of the White House? Is that how this works?” wrote Jim Acosta, independent journalist and former CNN White House correspondent, on X.

“Okay come on guys,” Gregg Carlstrom of The Economist quipped, “isn’t Trump taking a literal backhoe to the White House just a little heavy-handed as a metaphor?”

The White House press secretary is finding a lot of humor in international discord.

Karoline Leavitt doubled down Monday on a remarkably perverse response she gave a HuffPost reporter who inquired why the White House had chosen Budapest as the location for forthcoming ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

In a concise text exchange, Huffpost’s S.V. Dáte underscored the historical significance of the city as it relates to Ukraine-Russia relations, asking: “Who suggested Budapest?”

Leavitt had a three-word answer: “Your mom did.”

Fascinatingly, Leavitt seemed to believe that sharing the larger text exchange with her X followers would win her some public grace. Her continued response to Dáte, when pressed to explain whether she thought the situation was funny, reads as follows:

“It’s funny to me that you actually consider yourself a journal,” Leavitt said, according to a screenshot she posted to her social media. “You are a far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face. Stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.”

In her caption, Leavitt suggested that Dáte should not be addressed or conversed with as a legitimate member of the press on the basis that she believed his social media feeds amount to an “anti-Trump personal diary.”

“Activists who masquerade as real reporters do a disservice to the profession,” the 28-year-old press secretary—who has never held down a full-time job in the media industry—wrote on X.

Whether or not the Trump administration is taking the proceedings seriously, the location choice will not be lost on Russia and Ukraine’s leadership. In 1994, Budapest was chosen as the site in which America and the U.K. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for its surrender of nuclear weapons.

Thirty-one years later, it appears that the Budapest Memorandum has not worked out well for Ukraine. During a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, Donald Trump reportedly tossed Zelenskiy’s maps of the battlefield in the air while insisting that the foreign leader cede portions of Ukraine-controlled eastern Donbas to Russia.

European governments rushed to Zelenskiy’s defense, alarmed by Trump’s trust that Russian President Vladimir Putin would end his assault on Ukraine after claiming some portions of the country for Russia.

“We see President Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine, all these efforts are welcome but we don’t see Russia wanting peace,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, told the Financial Times on Monday. “We are discussing what more we can do.”

The European Commission suggested over the weekend that Ukraine could use a $163 billion reparations loan, bankrolled by frozen Russian assets, to buy arms abroad in their ongoing fight.

The government’s nuclear watchdog agency is poised to be understaffed, as Politico reports the Trump administration has placed about 80 percent of its personnel on furlough amid the ongoing government shutdown.

The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semiautonomous agency within the Department of Energy that maintains the U.S. nuclear stockpile, responds to nuclear emergencies domestically and abroad, and works to prevent nuclear proliferation globally. The NNSA’s staff of fewer than 2,000 workers oversees about 60,000 contractors.

On Monday morning, the administration sent out furlough notices to about 1,400 employees, Politico reports, leaving just 375 staff members on the job for the time being. This is an unprecedented action in the agency’s 25-year history.

Last week, when the then-impending cuts were first reported, Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the workers “critical to modernizing our nuclear arsenal.”

This is just the latest controversial NNSA staffing news to come out of the second Trump administration. The agency previously faced scrutiny for terminating hundreds of workers at the behest of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, before scrambling to rehire some of them as Wright confessed he’d “made mistakes” and moved “a little too quickly.”

Republican Representative Chip Roy took some time on Monday to remind Americans that his party still has no regard for the separation of church and state, something the Founding Fathers they love to praise cared deeply about.

“The truth is, the Marxists, the radicals, and the Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend, they cannot handle the truth,” Roy said, referring to the widespread No Kings protests on Saturday. “And the truth is that there is a king, and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it. His administration has been willing to say it. And Charlie Kirk was willing to say it, and he got killed for it.”

Roy sounds like a crazed individual who has not read much of the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. And he seriously misrepresents the makeup of the No Kings protests in the process, sticking to the party script of it being a haven for antifa-loving Communists rather than a very peaceful gathering of Americans closer to the political middle of this country.

We are not a theocracy; Jesus Christ is not the king of America. There is an entire clause in the First Amendment aimed at curtailing the very speech Roy put forth on Monday. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Roy and his fellow Republicans may be too deep in their religious psychosis to take heed.

President Donald Trump flailed Monday while walking back his support for Ukraine.

During a press conference, Trump was asked about a comment he made last month suggesting that Ukraine could “win” the war against Russia and claim all of the territory seized by Russia. At the time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed the position as a “big shift” from his American ally. 

But on Monday, it seemed that the U.S. president had shifted back.

“Well, they could. They could still win it. I don’t think they will. But they could still win it. I never said they would win it, I said they could—anything can happen, you know, war is a very strange thing, a lot of bad things happen, a lot of good things happen,” Trump replied.  

So basically, it’s anyone’s game. It seems clear that Trump’s nonstatements, which are able to flip-flop despite not expressing any real position, demonstrate just how little grip the president actually has on the situation in Ukraine. 

Trump even lashed out at one journalist when she asked what was really stopping him from actually helping Ukraine. 

“You’re the most powerful man on earth, why don’t you just enable Ukraine to finish this war tomorrow?” the reporter asked. 

“Well, if you knew anything about what you were talking about—” Trump started. 

“I do,” she replied. 

“You do? I don’t think you do, really. I don’t think you do because it’s a little bit more complicated than that,” Trump said. 

Last week, Zelenskiy left the White House disappointed after Trump reneged on an offer to supply Tomahawk missiles to the embattled country, following a lengthy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump reportedly had a fit during the meeting, cursing at Zelenskiy and throwing his maps of the battlefield.