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Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwayThe East Wing, the entrance to the White House for millions of Americans on official tours, the site of offices for every first lady for nearly half a century and the home of calligraphers who prepared thousands of invitations for White House state dinners, disappeared into a pile of rubble yesterday. It had stood for 123 years.
Built during the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an entryway for guests arriving in carriages, and rebuilt during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the East Wing met its end under orders from Trump. He dismissed it this week as “a very small building” that was in the way of his planned 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom. With it went the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and the East Colonnade, which connected the East Wing to the White House and included the president’s theater. “It’s not just a building,” said Laura Schwartz, the White House director of events in the Clinton administration. “It’s the living history.”
Meeting a need
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Tearing down the East Wing to make space for the ballroom was an unfortunate necessity, said Gahl Hodges Burt, who was social secretary for three years under President Ronald Reagan. Since the largest spaces in the building have room for 200 seated guests at most, recent administrations have erected enormous tents on the South Lawn for ever larger state dinners.
“Putting up a tent does nothing but make people upset that they’ve come to a state dinner but they never get inside the White House,” Burt said. “The only bathroom facilities for a tent are porta-potties. Setting up a kitchen out there is hugely expensive. When the tent is up, the helicopter can’t land. And the grass dies.” (Ms. Burt was referring to the presidential helicopter, Marine One.)
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Michael LaRosa, the press secretary to Jill Biden, lamented the loss but agreed that a ballroom was needed: “The French have the Élysée Palace, and here we are having a lawn party.”
A rich history
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During its 123 years, two modern East Wing incidents stand out.
In 2009, in what passed as a scandal at the time, two uninvited guests and aspiring television reality stars, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, slipped into the first state dinner of the Obama administration. They rubbed shoulders with Vice President Joe Biden.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his West Wing office and rushed him into a bunker below the East Wing, which had been built as a shelter for Roosevelt during World War II. Cheney headed underground the moment that American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
The East Wing never had the political importance or cachet of the West Wing, which houses the Oval Office. But it became prominent, and controversial, when Republicans denounced the expensive new construction, built partly to cover Roosevelt’s new underground shelter, as wasteful.
The first lady’s spot
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The personality of the East Wing was always calmer and less intense than that of the testosterone-filled West Wing. Until Thursday, the ground floor housed the White House visitors’ office and the Office of Legislative Affairs, while the second floor was home to the White House Military Office and the offices of the first lady.
Presidents watched the Super Bowl and showed movies before their release in the theater in the colonnade, which was used as a coat check for big events. During holiday parties, a band would often play Christmas carols just outside the East Wing entrance as guests arrived.
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Melania Trump visited the East Wing so infrequently during her husband’s first term that her empty office there was converted into a gift-wrapping room. It is unclear how many times she has been there in the second term, or if she had offered any feedback on her husband’s plans.
For more
The White House released a list of donors who are helping Trump pay for the $300 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House.
“The Daily” podcast today is about the demolition.
On late night, Stephen Colbert talked about the demolition.
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They’re two of the oldest scams in gambling: Rigging a card game and rigging a ball game. Yesterday, federal officials charged dozens of people — including two active N.B.A. figures and several reputed mobsters — in schemes to carry out both.
But these scams were anything but old-fashioned. Each used high-tech methods that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, according to officials.
The poker scheme: Officials said four New York Mafia families — the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese families — set up poker nights that swindled millions of dollars from unwitting players. Chauncey Billups, the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, was charged with playing the role of a “face card,” taking part in the games to attract high rollers.
In some of the rigged games, the poker chip trays had hidden cameras that could read the cards on the table. Sometimes, the cards had markings visible only to people wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses, officials said.
The organizers are also accused of using a card-shuffling machine that could read the cards in the deck and predict which player had the best hand. That information would then make its way back to the table, through a relay of insiders who communicated with cellphones and secret signals.
The basketball scheme: With online betting, prop bets allow individual wagers on nearly every player and every statistic. Now players don’t need to throw a game to make gamblers rich. They just need to miss a shot — or take a seat on the bench.
In March 2023, the indictment says, the veteran guard Terry Rozier told an associate that he planned to pull himself out of a game in the first quarter, citing an injury. Word spread among a group of bettors, who placed hundreds of thousands of dollars of bets on Rozier to under-deliver that night. The bets on his points, assists and 3-point totals paid out — and the gamblers split the proceeds with Rozier, prosecutors said.
More coverage
Billups and Rozier were arrested yesterday morning. The N.B.A. placed them on leave from their teams.
Damon Jones, a former player and coach with the Cleveland Cavaliers, was also charged in both schemes. He is accused of sharing inside information about one player who is unnamed in the indictment. The Athletic reports it was LeBron James.
The poker indictment added to New York’s rich lineage of mob nicknames. This time, they include “Flappy,” “The Wrestler” and “Juice.”
THE LATEST NEWS
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Trump called off plans to send federal agents into San Francisco. He wrote on social media that “friends” had asked him to reconsider, citing Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce.
Who are the federal forces on the street? And what powers do they have? These graphics explain.
A protester in Washington D.C. is suing National Guard members and police officers, saying they wrongfully arrested him for playing the “Imperial March” from “Star Wars.”
Boat Strikes
Trump said he would bypass Congress and expand his military operation against drug cartels, which has killed at least 37 people in nine airstrikes at sea.
Soon after the U.S. began blowing up boats in the Caribbean, unidentified bodies with burn marks and missing limbs started washing up in Trinidad.
More on Politics
Vladimir Putin called Trump’s new oil sanctions “an unfriendly act” and warned of an overwhelming response if Ukraine were to get the powerful missiles it seeks.
The administration says it will allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest tracts of pristine wilderness left in the country.
Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering and has done business with the Trump family’s crypto operation.
Virginia Democrats plan to redraw House maps, which could give them three extra seats. It’s the latest front in a national redistricting battle.
Four family members of a Republican candidate for Illinois governor, Darren Bailey, died in a helicopter crash.
Mayor Eric Adams endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race, casting aside months of bitterness.
Other Big Stories
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Kim Kardashian says that she has been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.
The highest-ranking prelate of the Anglican Church in North America, a conservative breakaway from the Episcopal Church, faces accusations of sexual harassment, plagiarism and bullying from former employees.
The man accused of starting the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, which burned more than 23,000 acres and killed 12 people, pleaded not guilty.
Iceland lost the distinction of being one of the last places in the world without a confirmed sighting of wild mosquitoes. A bug enthusiast found three.
OPINIONS
Americans are thrilled with the Louvre heist. It’s because we need a story to escape into, Sloane Crosley writes.
The 2025 World Series will be the last with only human umpires. Savor it, Jane Leavy writes.
CHINA’S CHANGING WORKFORCE
The Chinese dream once followed a simple formula: move to a big city, work hard, and buy a home. But China’s economy is suffering. Young people are struggling to find the kind of lucrative office jobs that were once common after college, and some are rejecting the pressure to pursue prosperity at all costs. Meanwhile, the population is aging, and blue-collar jobs are becoming increasingly attractive.
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“Tainted Love”: Dave Ball, one half of the English synth-pop duo Soft Cell, died at 66. His bandmate Marc Almond found him, Ball said, because he “heard me making bleepy noises on a synthesizer.”
SPORTS
M.L.B.: The World Series kicks off tonight, with the Toronto Blue Jays taking on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Here are our experts’ predictions.
Olympics: Winter Olympic hopefuls have spent the past few months training on roller-skis, water-ramps, airbags — anything but snow — during the offseason. See how Team USA does it.
ARTS AND IDEAS
“Almost all of American history is division,” the documentarian Ken Burns said recently. That’s true today, of course, but it was also true during the Revolutionary War — an era that has taken on a sentimentality that often strips it of nuance.
Burns’s new project, “The American Revolution,” set to air on PBS next month, aims to strip away the nostalgia. His team drew on two dozen historical consultants, and their differing views appear onscreen not as an argument, Jennifer Schuessler writes, “but as a kind of chorus — a reminder that the Revolution meant, and still means, different things to different people.”
THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …
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Elisabeth Bumiller writes about the people, politics and culture of the nation’s capital, and how decisions made there affect lives across the country and the world.
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