A nonprofit group created to help preserve the character of the White House is being accused of “complicity” in President Donald Trump’s controversial remaking of the iconic building to suit his taste.
The White House Historical Association has stayed silent as Trump pursues an estimated $900 million worth of renovations that include demolishing the East Wing to make way for a massive, gilded ballroom and underground military complex, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The association — established in 1961 by then-first lady Jacqueline Kennedy — has also remained on the sidelines of a legal battle over construction of his estimated $600 million ballroom, which the Supreme Court last month narrowly allowed to continue as Chief Justice John Roberts called it “likely unlawful” in a stinging dissent.
Other Trump-ordered changes include paving over the lawn of Kennedy’s Rose Garden, installing a granite helipad on the South Lawn and festooning the Oval Office with rococo-style, gold-leaf accents.
“Jackie Kennedy founded the organization because she thought the White House should be treated like a museum,” DC Preservation League executive director Rebecca Miller told the Post. “The White House Historical Association’s complicity towards this administration’s actions is not in that spirit.”
open image in galleryA former WHHA historian, Ed Lengel, also told the Post that association CEO Stewart McLaurin has wrongly compared Trump’s renovations to earlier ones that sparked outrage at the time but were later accepted.
Lengel said that “every president who has made a change — and that includes Harry Truman and his gutting of the interior of the White House — has consulted carefully with Congress, with architects, with historians to ensure that the changes they made were consistent with the founders’ vision of what the White House should be, and to ensure that these changes are an organic growth from past development.”
“This is not the same thing,” he added.
Some donors and current and former staffers have questioned whether the association should do more to oppose Trump’s renovations, but its leaders say it’s not their place, according to the Post.
Neither the association nor the White House responded to inquiries from The Independent.
open image in galleryBut an association spokesperson told the Post that “our work remains aligned with the mission” laid out by Kennedy, whose likeness adorns a sculpture outside the group’s headquarters, along with her words, “The White House belongs to the American people.”
“The Association continues its work in historical research, education and preservation of the White House collection,” the spokesperson added.
Philanthropist and WHHA member Marlene Malek — widow of business executive and Republican presidential fundraiser Fred Malek — is among the group’s leaders and supporters who distinguish between preserving the White House’s interior and exterior.
“We keep the White House inside in order,” she told the Post. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the outside.”
Trump has publicly championed the association and helped it with fundraising, including by previously donating his salary, according to the Post.
open image in galleryLast year, he toured its $85 million “The People’s House” exhibit, which includes a life-size recreation of the Oval Office. During the visit, Trump touted his White House renovations while standing outside near McLaurin and wearing a red MAGA hat emblazoned with “Trump was right about everything.”
The chair of the association’s board of directors, Goldman Sachs executive vice president John F.W. Rogers, is a “fixture in Republican establishment circles” who helped incoming first lady Melania Trump assemble her staff ahead of her husband’s second term, Semafor reported shortly after the 2024 election.
Rogers was also an informal adviser to Melania Trump during Trump’s first term, and played similar roles in Republican administrations dating back to the Ronald Reagan era, according to Semafor.
Vice chair Teresa Carlson, a tech executive with government ties who Trump lavished with praise during the 2019 WHHA Dinner, was hired in July as the artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s first “global head of public sector and market development.”
At the time, the company was feuding with Trump over limits on the military use of its technology, with the president calling it a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” in a social media post that also said he’d ordered, “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.”
open image in galleryThat led to a lawsuit in which a federal judge last month sided with Anthropic and said the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk to national security was “illegal and baseless.”
Days later, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios that Anthropic was “back on the right side,” with company co-founder Tom Brown hailing Trump’s pro-data center stance during a public discussion with Lutnick at the recent meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, North Carolina.
WHHA secretary Anita McBride, an expert on the legacies of American first ladies and White House operations, served in the administrations of all three Republican presidents who preceded Trump: Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
In 2020, McBride publicly defended Trump’s break with precedent when he held a private White House memorial service for his younger brother, Robert.
“The White House is a very complex place. It’s an office, it’s a museum and it’s a home,” she told The Associated Press. “We loan it to the president for the time he or she is living there. Coming from that perspective, we need to be understanding of some decisions that they make in a case like this.”