It was shocking to see images of heavy equipment clawing chunks out of the East Wing of the White House, reducing a historic structure built by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a twisted mass of steel, stone and concrete. Subscribe for unlimited access to The Post You can cancel anytime. Subscribe

President Donald Trump’s promise that his enormous new ballroom wouldn’t touch or interfere with the existing structure was no longer operative. The assurances from his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that “nothing will be torn down” do not seem to have been made in good faith. With damning visual evidence that the ballroom project would radically alter the design of the White House and its stately grounds, the public began to pay attention, absorbing the worrisome details: that the

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