Wednesday was breezy, bright and autumnal in Washington — the perfect backdrop for a stroll to the White House to watch the swift demolition of the East Wing.

I heard it before I saw it: the thrum of construction equipment and a loud rat-tat-tat that could have been digging or drilling. As I weaved through a group of schoolchildren posing for photographs in front of the main residence, I could see the arms of two excavators bobbing around, too tall to be hidden by the thick white fence erected around the fresh construction site. Behind them, a cloud of dust obscured the clear air.

It wasn’t so long ago that Trump was promising his plan to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the grounds “won’t interfere with the current building.” In fact, my colleague Luke Broadwater reported today that the entire wing, which is historically the domain of the first lady, will be razed in the project, and the price tag would increase to $300 million, $100 million more than initially estimated.

Images of the demolition, which began on Monday, have rocketed around the globe, swiftly becoming political fodder and a perfect Rorschach test for a deeply polarizing presidency.

“This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, on X, above a picture showing roof tiles and windowpanes cascading from the facade of the wing, having fallen victim to the excavators’ jaws. “Illegal, destructive, and not helping you.”

The project has left historians and architects deeply alarmed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation on Wednesday urged officials to pause until it could go through the “legally required public review process.” Last week, Trump seemed to suggest to donors that “no approvals” were required for the project.

Trump’s allies insist that the images show a president shaking up Washington, just like he promised. In a sign of awareness that they could not entirely ignore the criticism of the project, though, administration officials called the uproar “manufactured outrage” in a release that detailed other renovations on the building over the years.

“He’s the builder-in-chief,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said brightly on Fox News on Tuesday. “In large part, he was re-elected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things.”

Leave it better than you found it?

Trump, ever the developer, has certainly spent a lot of time building things at the White House. He paved over the lawn in the Rose Garden to create a patio. He has added gold filigree to the Oval Office and ornate chandeliers to the Cabinet Room, remaking the White House with an indelible imprint of Mar-a-Lago maximalism that is all but certain to outlast his presidency.