All of the living former presidents, along with their immediate family members, have made it pretty clear that they can’t stand Donald Trump. Some have tried to deal with this by avoiding Trump and largely refraining from commentary on his antics. But now, former First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, along with several former First Daughters, have confirmed what you probably already suspected: They aren’t big fans of Trump tearing down the East Wing to build a gilded White House ballroom.
Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton was the first to bash Trump’s extreme White House makeover. She posted this on X before the East Wing had been fully reduced to rubble:
Also unsurprising: Days later, she plugged “not his house” merch:
But as the East Wing was coming down, we heard from two First Daughters who are less vocal with their Trump criticism. First, Chelsea Clinton bashed Trump for “a wrecking ball to our heritage” in a USA Today opinion piece:
The White House will always be a home I was lucky enough to live in for a while. Even more important, it is a mirror of our democracy, resilient when we honor its foundations but fragile when we take them for granted. What was dismantled today isn’t just marble or plaster; it is a reflection of how easily history can be erased when power forgets purpose.
A day later, Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, lamented the loss of the East Wing in the New York Times, calling the demolition “heartbreaking”:
Among certain jaded observers, there’s been a strain of chatter dismissing the damage, saying the East Wing was never all that architecturally distinguished. But it was not just a building made of brick and plaster; it was the people’s house, a building suffused with the spirit of the ideals that built it. It was a building that invited you to look beyond your own life, your own reality, to something bigger, a huge story we all inhabit. To stand in such a place makes you feel small, yet also larger than just yourself. It makes you aware of the continuum of history in a way that feels akin to sacredness.
… We silence so much when we tear down places that are there to teach us, inspire us, humble us. Ghosts and memories drift away in the dust, the wreckage, and we are all poorer as a result.
This week, even Jenna Bush Hager, the Today show co-host who rarely expresses any political opinions, made a crack about her former residence while interviewing Michelle Obama about her new book, The Look.
“As you know, the First Lady is a strange job,” Obama said. “There’s no guidebook, there’s barely a staff, now we don’t have a building.”
“I know,” Hager said, making a cringing face. “RIP, the East Wing.”
(Their comments start at the two-minute mark in the video below.)
Obama sharpened her criticism of the ballroom project as her press tour continued. During a Tuesday-night appearance on The Late Show, she quipped, “Remember that?” when host Stephen Colbert asked about the demolition.
She went on to describe the East Wing, which was traditionally the First Ladies’ domain, as the part of the White House where “life happened,” while the West Wing was “work.”
“It was an important distinction, because the West Wing team, they needed that break. You know, they needed to come to a place where they could be reminded of the reason we were doing this,” she explained.
Obama added that she’s “confused” about why Trump’s allowed to knock down a huge part of the White House while there were so many presidential norms her family tried to follow.
“It makes me confused,” she said. “I am confused by what are our norms? What are our standards? What are our traditions? I just feel like what is important to us as a nation anymore, because I’m lost. There were a whole standard of norms and rules that we followed to a T that we painstakingly tried to uphold, because it was bigger than us … that East Wing … it’s not mine. It is ours.”
During a live taping of her podcast, IMO, in Brooklyn on Wednesday night, Obama said Trump’s disregard for the White House shows how little he thinks of the First Lady’s role.
“When we talk about the East Wing, it is the heart of the work. And to denigrate it, to tear it down, to pretend like it doesn’t matter — it’s a reflection of how you think of that role,” Obama said, per Vanity Fair. “Whether the West Wing understood it or not, I used to tell them: All the stuff we do on the East Wing, from the clothes I wear to [family dogs] Bo and Sunny to Malia and Sasha and grandma, those were five extra approval points that he got, because we provided a balance.”
If nothing else, the East Wing demolition is giving the former First Family members something to commiserate about the next time they all pal around without Trump.
