earthfamilyalpha: October 2025

It's like the very definition of visceral.

A wannabe tyrant destroys a national landmark in a matter of days.

Being the inveterate liar he is, we should have known that the promise to not touch it would be just as true as his statement to sailors in the Far East that 94% of the Gulf of Mexico borders US soil.

The number is closer to 40% depending on whether you think Cuba exist.

Mexico is just over 50%.

This from Wikipedia and others:

The East Wing Colonnade of the Peoples House was not built 120 years ago, it was built by President Thomas Jefferson when he added colonnaded terraces to the east and west sides of the White House.

Under President Andrew Jackson in 1834, running water was piped in from a spring and pumped up into the east terrace in metal tubes. These ran through the walls and protruded into the rooms, controlled by spigots. Initially, the water was for washing items, but soon the first bathing rooms were created, in the ground-level east colonnade. President Martin Van Buren had shower baths installed here.

The East Wing of the White House complex was built in 1902 by Teddy Roosevelt and significantly expanded in 1942 by Franklyn Roosevelt. It was then that the the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the building was buried deep below the office space for the first lady and her staff, including the White House social secretary, correspondence staff, and the White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office.

The first small East Wing built in 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt renovations served as an entrance for formal and public visitors during large social gatherings, when it was necessary to accommodate many cars and carriages. Its primary feature was the long cloak room with spots for coats and hats of the ladies and gentlemen.

The two-story East Wing was designed by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow and Teddy's coatroom was integrated into the new building becoming the White House Family Theater.

But it was Eleanor Roosevelt who made it a place for women.

"It has long been a space of female power and a female niche in the White House," said Elizabeth Rees, a historian and research fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "With the West Wing being a traditionally male-dominated space, the East Wing was a unique physical space for women to work…and provided them with their own environment in which to flourish."

In the 1960s, during the Kennedy administration, the first lady's staff expanded rapidly.

"As mass media is on the rise and there's enormous press interest in this young, glamorous first lady and her small children, that interest necessitates that there is a press arm for the first lady to cover her activities and to spread all this information to the press," said Rees.

"Betty Ford and earlier First Ladies were pretty much working out of their bedrooms, literally," said MaryAnne Borrelli, author of The Politics of the President's Wife.

But Betty Ford understood that "If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart"

During this time, Ford, a proponent of women's rights, argued for equal pay for her female staff and an end to sex-based discrimination in the East Wing, according to the White House Historical Association.

However, it was First Lady Rosalynn Carter who in 1977 was the first to keep her own office in the East Wing.

Modern first ladies have used the East Wing as a base to lead a number of initiatives aimed at improving the country. Laura Bush led nationwide literacy campaigns out of the East Wing during her tenure as first lady in the early 2000s, while Michelle Obama ran her "Let’s Move" program to bolster public health under her husband's administration.

When the Electoral College cast their votes in 2016 for the candidate who came in 2nd place, many of us knew that he was unfit for the job. I told my partner that the Nation had succumbed to the lower centers of fear and hatred and that misogyny and racism had raised its ugly head from the dark waters of our national psyche.

When he was removed 4 years later with 7 million more votes, I posted that the Wicked Witch was dead. And that his memory would forever be scorned as he failed in the attempt to upend our 245 year history of the peaceful transfer of power.

I remember all those R's saying that this was it.

That they have had enough.

But in his second impeachment,

We needed 10 more of them to put this scourge behind us

Because 57 Ayes against 43 No's was not enough,

And the Scourge returned with a vengeance

And now he has demolished our Place of the Heart in less than a week.

In its place will stand a 90,000 square foot monument

to greed and wealth.

and Corruption.

He says it will cost 350 million for 90,000 square feet.

That's 3,333 a square foot.