President Donald J. Trump greets guests on the South Lawn of the White House Monday, April 22, 2019, during the 141st White House Easter Egg Roll. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
After tearing down the White House East Wing without the legal authority to do so, President Donald Trump is now acting in a way which suggests he may have designs on the building’s iconic Ionic columns.
“President Donald Trump appeared absorbed by the White House’s columns on Monday, lingering for several minutes and running his hands along the stonework,” The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster reported on Monday night. “The row of columns framing the White House’s entrance seemed to arrest the 79-year-old president’s attention as he returned from Arlington National Cemetery after delivering a boastful Memorial Day speech.”
Noting that the video of Trump assessing the column was first posted by NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer, Forster added that the video seemed to show Trump “tracing the bottom of the column with his hands as he appeared to study its details. According to White House press pool reports, Trump spent six minutes outside the entrance before walking inside.” He also seemed to order photographers to take pictures of the column.
While some online have speculated that this is further evidence of Trump’s supposed cognitive decline, others have pointed out that Trump has previously advocated for the column to be torn down and replaced with a more luxurious alternative.
“Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal arts commission, proposed replacing the Ionic columns with Corinthian columns, a more luxurious style preferred by Trump, The Washington Post first reported in March,” Forster wrote. In that Washington Post article, it was observed that “the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.”
Defending their position to the Post, Cook claimed that the “Corinthian is the highest order [of column], and that’s what our other two branches of government have. Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me.”
In fact, the White House was designed with Ionic columns precisely because they are considered to be less ostentatious. Their purpose was to reinforce the notion that the White House is the “People’s House.”
If Trump destroys the White House’s columns, that will not be his first unilateral change on the building he is legally supposed to only inhabit temporarily. Trump had previously destroyed the White House’s historic East Wing to build his ballroom, and continues to push for the $1 billion ballroom despite being told by the courts that he has no legal authority to do so and despite initially claiming it would not cost taxpayer money. He has also announced plans to rip out a fixture installed by President Thomas Jefferson, saying he would install in its place a "beautiful, black granite" installation to replace the Tennessee Flagstone pavers on the West Wing Colonnade. Trump said he would pay for the installation himself and send the Jeffersonian originals to a nursery for safekeeping.