Strictly come despot: Trump's new ballroom is a power move

“Nothing will be torn down,” said the White House press secretary of President Trump's plans to add a new $250m (£190m) ballroom to the building where she and her boss work.

- Rowan Moore Architecture Critic

"It'll be near it but not touching it," said Trump, "and pays total respect to the existing building." So no one should be surprised, given the administration's form in saying one thing and doing another, to see the videos that have emerged of diggers munching through the East Wing of the White House, followed by aerial images that show that this part has already been torn down. It is a brutal spectacle, an architectural amputation of a national and global icon, carried out at shocking speed.

The property-developer-turned-president has already made the Oval Office into a work of gilded historical camp, a Liberace-crosses-the-Delaware interior of rococo ornament and multiple framed portraits of men. He has installed a "presidential walk of fame" in the West Wing colonnade. He has had the lawn in the middle of the Rose Garden paved over and erected two 27-metre flagpoles. And he has unveiled plans for a gigantic triumphal arch, surmounted by a huge winged figure, on a line between the Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington National Cemetery, to be built in time for next July's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.