WASHINGTON (New York Times News)

Construction workers ripped the face off the East Wing on Monday as construction of President Donald Trump’s $250 million (or so he estimates) ballroom entered its next phase.

By late afternoon, reporters hanging out in a park near the Treasury Department could see a glimpse of the renovation in progress as the long arm of a track excavator reached up and tore the walls clean off the building. Work crews wandered around as detritus - window panes, building blocks and wires - piled up.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the White House, Trump was meeting with a collegiate baseball championship team. "You know, we’re building right behind us, we’re building a ballroom,” he told them.

"Right on the other side, you have a lot of construction going on,” he said, "which you might hear periodically.”

"It just started today,” he added.

A little while later, he posted about the construction on social media: "Completely separate from the White House itself, the East Wing is being fully modernised as part of this process, and will be more beautiful than ever when it is complete!”

News of the demolition was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The East Wing is the side of the White House that has historically been the domain of the first lady. Early last month, some of Melania Trump’s staff began boxing up their belongings and moving into other parts of the White House complex in anticipation of the disruption ahead.

The plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom constitute one of the largest renovations to the building in decades. Not since President Harry S. Truman built out what became the West Wing has a construction project so big been undertaken on the White House grounds. On Monday, Trump said the ballroom would be able to hold "999” people.

He originally said in July that the construction of his ballroom "won’t interfere with the current building,” but that always seemed unrealistic given how big the plans were.

The president has a long history of tearing things to the ground. He was, after all, a real estate developer.

In 1980, he ka-blammed the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan so that he could raise Trump Tower. He promised to preserve the treasured limestone friezes atop the old building but then went and jackhammered them into oblivion, infuriating the city’s beau monde.