Yes, most Americans oppose the East Wing demolition. But…

It’s one of those sentences one can write about the second Trump administration that would have seemed ludicrously hyperbolic one year ago, but it is nonetheless true: The president of the United States unilaterally obliterated one-third of the structure that constitutes the White House. Two weeks ago, the White House had an East and a West Wing. Now it doesn’t.

In part because the demolition of the East Wing was so sudden, the reaction has been broadly negative. It’s almost certainly true that a slow, deliberate, adjudicated process for replacing the East Wing with a large ballroom would have triggered significant opposition. Such a process, though, might have softened the appearance that Trump was simply reshaping the People’s House as though it was instead a Trump Organization property.

Polling conducted by YouGov found that most Americans disapprove of the destruction of the East Wing. Four in 10 strongly disapprove, including 7 in 10 Democrats and almost half of independents.

That said, 3 in 10 Americans approve — including a majority of Republicans. There’s an interesting age split in the YouGov data, with older Americans being more likely to express approval of the destruction, almost certainly a function of the fact that older Americans are more likely to be Republican.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the significance of that support, though. A third of Republicans strongly approve of Trump simply smashing the East Wing into rubble, something that it is extremely safe to assume they would have viewed more skeptically had it been undertaken by, say, Barack Obama. Condemnation from Democrats would likely have been more modest under such circumstances, sure … but no Democratic president would have suddenly taken a wrecking ball to the White House without notice. (Harry Truman, a Democrat, did oversee a renovation of the building, but he did so with guidance and input from appointed officials and experts.)

New polling conducted for ABC News and The Washington Post shows similar disapproval of the East Wing’s destruction. Again, most Americans view the move negatively. Again, most Republicans support it, with a third supporting it strongly. And, again, there’s a divide by age.

It is not the case that support for the destruction of the East Wing is a function of people not understanding what happened. YouGov asked Americans whether they’d seen images or video of the building being demolished. Six in 10 Americans said they had, including a majority of Republicans. In other words, at least some (but probably quite a few) Republicans saw the destruction with their own eyes and approved.

Interestingly, there’s a correlation between having seen photos or videos and approval of the destruction when considering age. In other words, older people are more likely to say they’ve seen photos or videos of the demolition and to say they approve. But this is almost certainly a demonstration of the “correlation does not equal causation” axiom; it’s likely that older Americans are simply more likely to support Trump and more likely to consume traditional news media that covered the destruction.

Update: YouGov generously shared data on views of the demolition relative to whether individuals had seen photos or videos of the destruction. In fact, Republicans who’d seen the destruction were much more likely to say that they approved of it occurring.

One takeaway here is that the demolition of the East Wing is unpopular. But another is that this, too, has collapsed into a partisan framework. An action that would almost certainly have met with condemnation if suggested to Trump voters in October 2024 is, in October 2025, viewed positively for little more reason than that Trump did it.

If the destruction of a substantial portion of the White House is an on-the-nose metaphor for Trump’s attack on American democracy, consider how we might extrapolate Republican support for his doing so.

Photo: The White House during the 1952 renovation. (National Archives)