Ohio University historian and scholar of First Ladies Katherine Jellison told POLITICO that watching the East Wing's demolition was her "living nightmare." She also spoke for anyone who still believes the White House belongs to the people rather than to the vanity of one man. To Jellison the bulldozing of the East Wing was not only an act of renovation but an act of desecration, as deliberate and joyless as everything else Trump has ever touched.

Jellison's lament was rooted in the historian's eye for the irreplaceable. "For those of us who do oral histories," she said, "a place like the East Wing is a physical structure that can spark those kinds of memories." She was not exaggerating. The East Wing was more than brick and plaster. It was the chamber where the evolving role of the First Lady took form.

From Eleanor Roosevelt's activism to Betty Ford's candor to Jaqueline Kennedy's class to Michelle Obama's grace, the East Wing was the nation's domestic conscience. Now it's rubble beneath the ruining bulldozers of the psychotic MAGA toad-god.

The White House insists that the mementos of the historic building have been preserved, as if heritage could be catalogued into storage boxes and trucked away to safety. Jellison was unconvinced. Nor should anyone else be. "Was due diligence done to preserve important records, important artifacts, important objects?" she asked. "We really don't know."

We do know what Trump values. Not history, not memory, certainly not the women whose public service gave the East Wing its dignity. He values only his slavering ego, and his new ballroom will be a mirror of his own public decay.

The act is indecent even by Trump's debased standards. The East Wing expansion of 1942 symbolised Eleanor Roosevelt's political and humanitarian reach at a time when her husband could not leave his wheelchair. Its creation marked the First Lady's evolution from ornamental spouse to working public servant and leader. The building, modest in size but immense in significance, embodied the heartbeat of civic duty within the walls of power. Now that heartbeat has been silenced forever, to make way for gaudy chandeliers and cheap champagne.

"Betty Ford once said that if the West Wing is the mind of the nation, the East Wing is the heart," Jellison said. Now that heart has been ripped out. In its place will rise a ballroom that serves as a temple to self-worship, where the Trump "administration" can toast its own barbarism under ugly gilded ceilings. The symbolism is almost too crude for parody. The man who never understood government as service has now vandalised its physical core.

There are ways to restore and modernise historic buildings. Responsible leaders consult preservation bodies and architectural historians. Trump consulted no one. "Before we were even warned," Jellison said, "we saw bulldozers bringing the place down."

Jellison observed that even some conservatives are unnerved by the secrecy. The sudden appearance of heavy machinery on the White House lawn has left many unsettled, as if witnessing a metaphor for national collapse. The People's House now bears an open wound where history once breathed. Today there is only dust.

The current First Lady's invisibility completes the tableau. "Mrs Trump was low-profile in the first Trump administration," Jellison said, "and even lower profile in the second." There is a bleak symmetry in that absence. The vanished East Wing mirrors the vanishing of any moral or civic presence in this desecrated White House.

The Washington Post arrogantly termed the destruction of the East Wing as "... Trump versus the NIMBYs." What the Post clearly doesn't understand (or pretends not to understand) is that the White House sits in every American's backyard.

The East Wing once represented continuity, public service and the growing dignity and importance of its occupant. Its destruction now represents Trump's America at its worst, greedy, ignorant and incurious about its own past.

The White House is not merely diminished by this act, it's defiled. No amount of polished marble or vulgar gold trim can disguise what has been lost. And the man responsible, preening over his empty ballroom, will never understand that what he destroyed was not only a building but America's sacred memory itself.