It’s so on the nose it veers into the cliche. A bulldozer crashing its way through the walls of the White House ’s East Wing, crunching over splintered timber, tangles of wires, rebar, drywall, and plaster. If the scene had been crafted in the Saturday Night Live writers room President Donald Trump would be driving the excavator himself. After all, the demolition is the traumatic birth of his brainchild: A $250 million ballroom modeled after the one at Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort; a glass and columned behemoth that historians and architects warn is being built with little regard for the historic character of the building, and outside the bounds of the law. Welcome to Mar-a-Lago on the National Mall, Trump’s Versailles in Washington.

“Historically, major White House reno

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