The Heart of the Nation in Ruins: The East Wing Demolished

This piece is part of Yellow Scene Magazine’s Opinion section. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent a reported news position. At Yellow Scene, opinion pieces speak freely, challenge assumptions, and say the quiet parts out loud.

“If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.” – Betty Ford

There is evidence that a fifth plane was almost hijacked on 9/11. It was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles that morning. Several passengers onboard raised red flags with the crew. When the FAA made the decision to ground all flights in the US later that morning, boxcutters were found left behind in the seats.

According to interviews with the men who planned 9/11, the target of United Flight 93 was the US Capitol. United Flight 23, the possible fifth plane, was likely targeting the White House. The dome of the US Capitol is is made of wrought iron; had it been hit it would have rained molten metal on whoever was still inside. As for the White House, we don’t have to imagine too hard about what that horror would have looked like. We have only to look at this week’s news.

Workers begin the demolition of the East Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 21, 2025. Photo © Sizzlipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Trump Administration has used the chaos of the latest government shutdown to demolish the East Wing of the White House. The current costs are estimated at $300 million. Trump has said that he plans to replace the East Wing with a lavish ballroom. For Trump, the poor man’s idea of a rich man, “lavish” means gold on every surface. Civil rights attorney Ken White was spot-on when he described the plans as “What is Uday Hussein ran a Ramada Inn?” The destruction of the East Wing came not from radical terrorists, but a different ideology: the untrammeled worship of human greed and the thirst for power.

The US Capitol was spared on 9/11 thanks to the men and women Flight 93. This included the captain, a Denver native named Jason Dahl. Before he was murdered, it appears that Dahl made efforts to alter the plane’s radio frequencies. He hoped the hijacker’s messages on the intercom would instead be relayed to air traffic control. This may have, in turn, given crucial information to the FAA in its pivotal decision to ground all flights.

The names of passengers and crew members of United Airlines Flight 93 are inscribed on Panel S-67 of the National September 11 Memorial’s South Pool in New York City, photographed on April 28, 2012. Photo by Luigi Novi

The passengers and crew of Flight 93 are honored in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Captain Jason Dahl is honored at Denver International Airport. Every time I fly out of Denver, I stop by the black stone memorial in Concourse B and pay my respects.

In 2025, the Trump Administration has given pardons to the men and women who stormed the Capitol on January 6, some of whom sought to kill legislators and called for the hanging of the Vice President. The polemicist Charlie Kirk, who plead the Fifth to the January 6 Committee about his role in the attack on the Capitol, was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And now the White House, seat of the US Presidency for 225 years, sits surrounded by rubble.

The images from this week brought up a small chapter from my own life. For two years, I volunteered for a local Historic Preservation Board. I reviewed the application for landmarking and demolition of properties. For any property in town at least 50 years old, we reviewed the demolition application based on the building’s cultural and historical significance. The builings in town, especially those dating back to its coal-mining past, are a record of the city’s history, and the board served as a check on the erosion of that history.

We were not a popular group. Every public comment section of an application had at least one screed from a citizen about our perceived uselessness. We were told that we held back growth and kept blight in town. It was common to be asked why “we” needed to keep “that old thing”, meaning whatever historic property was on the agenda.

I didn’t always feel good about the work, either. It felt like any efforts at educational outreach, the thing that might get the public to understand us, took years to plan. There were attempts to create public signage about local history; another city department said they would cost ten grand apiece to manufacture. Calling someone in another department was treated like an international incident. You would be surprised to this was a “have your people call my people” kind of place; so was I.

For anyone who has bristled at red tape with older properties, myself included, let’s all turn on the news and watch the dust rise from the debris of the East Wing. Those are the images of a world with no concept of history as part of the common treasury. A world where all property stands at the whims of its current resident. A world where nothing is of, for, or by “the People.”

Trump is the embodiment of “It’s mine, I’ll do what I want with it,” even if it’s the most famous house in the country. Even when it’s not home to just a man, but a country’s sense of itself, its heritage, both good and bad, its fears and its hopes. It’s the manifestation of Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals.”

I have known my share of people who thought “local character” and “sense of place” were punchlines, code words for stagnation. The question this week is: if “character” and “place” are not aspirations in the local township, why would they be respected at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?