Trump Is Not Tearing Down the White House

The East Wing that Democrats are currently going nuts over is actually a separate building built in 1942 that nobody much cared about until this week.

Here’s the totally non-iconic East Wing of the White House building (RIP), whose demolition millions of people are freaking out over this week.

The East Wing is not what everybody thinks of as The White House. I’ve been in the East Wing (not to meet a First Lady, but to take the standard tourist tour of the real White House), but I had totally forgotten what it looks like on the outside. It’s largely hidden away by elaborate landscaping.

Try to find in a search engine a photo of the outside of the East Wing before it was demolished this week. It takes a surprising amount of scrolling down to locate one.

I must confess that I was a 40-something professional journalist before I realized that the East Wing and the West Wing of the White House were not the east and west sides of the famous building in all the pictures, but are instead separate buildings connected to the historic White House by relatively narrow passageways. They are seldom photographed.

I could have benefited from the following graphical aid for the first four plus decades of my life:

The TV show The West Wing debuted in 1999, but I didn’t realize until this century that the title of the series referred to a separate building rather than to one half of the famous White House. Only then did I discover that the East Wing and West Wing are seldom visible in ground level photos of the White House.

This is a pretty embarrassing thing to remember about myself, much less write about it. But maybe confessing my confusion as a clueless middle-age journalist will help some other people this week get a grip.

It would help if the media referred to “the White House complex” or to “the White House campus,” rather than continue to play the charade that the outbuildings are part of “the White House.”

Other questions:

Paywall here.