President Trump says the East Wing that was demolished to make way for a new ballroom “looked like hell,” describing the area of the White House before it was torn down as a “poor, sad sight.”
“The East Wing was a beautiful, little, tiny structure that was built many years ago that was renovated, and expanded, and disbanded and columns ripped out — and it had nothing to do with the original building,” Trump said during a Monday interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
“It was a poor, sad sight, and I could have built the ballroom around it, but it would not have been– ” Trump said, before telling Ingraham, “We’re building one of the greatest ballrooms in the world.”
The president said last month that, following conversations with architects, the East Wing needed to be torn down in order to “properly” construct a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. When the project to build a ballroom was originally announced in July, Trump said that the new addition wouldn’t “interfere with the current building.”
Trump’s latest remarks about the East Wing came after he was asked by Ingraham to respond to reported comments by Michelle Obama. The former first lady called the East Wing “the heart of the work,” according to Vanity Fair.
“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.
In his interview with “The Ingraham Angle” host, Trump highlighted that the $300 million ballroom would be funded by private donors, saying that there would be “zero money spent by the government.”
Asked about reports that Melania Trump didn’t “love” the idea of destroying the East Wing — where the first lady’s office was located — the president replied, “She loved her little, tiny office. But you know what? She’s very smart. In about one day she was thinking — if you would ask her now, she says it’s great.”
“The East Wing sounds good, right?” Trump said.
“It sounds good. But the East Wing, that building, was renovated 20 times, including adding a floor to the top, which was terrible,” he said.
“It was [made] out of common brick, little, tiny windows. It looked like hell,” Trump said of the structure, which was originally built in 1902 and then expanded, with a second floor added, in 1942 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.
“It had nothing to do with the original building,” Trump said, “and I didn’t want to sacrifice a great ballroom for an OK ballroom by leaving it right smack in the middle.”
