Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Heartbreaking White House Makeover

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

With Donald Trump unceremoniously demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build his gigantic ballroom, Sam Stein and Sonny Bunch discuss cinema’s most iconic White House destruction scenes as the reality of the demolition images unfortunately imitate art. Get 40% off your Calm premium subscription at https://Calm.com/BulwarkTakes.

Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stey. I'm managing editor at the Bullock. I'm joined by Sonny Bunch, who is our spiritual guide through the movie industry. For this video, is going to be talking about the destruction of the White House by Donald Trump. There's a lot of cinematic angles to take around the destruction of the White House. But first, Sunny, I know you're a big interior decorating guy. I know you love architecture. Are you among the only people who's comfortable with the destruction of the East Wing, or do you find it repulsive, too? I've, you know, I spent a lot of time watching HGTV. The big news this week in the movie world is WB and Discovery splitting off. If I have to resubscribe to Discovery to get my HGTV, it's going to be bad. No, I don't watch any of that. The thing that's really grotesque about this is all of a sudden you just have pictures of like the destroyed White House. Just the facade just torn down. Like my six-year-old son would be very excited by this because there's a big vehicle out there doing it.

He likes big trucks. Yeah. Likes big trucks just like Trump, him and him and my six-year-old, right on the same. But it just like all of a sudden, it just torn down White House. And it really is jarring because I think we accept a lot of the changes that have happened to the White House as just like that's the normal course of new president moves in and they decorated how they want. Obama did this, W did this, the Clintons did this. Like there's a certain level of that that you accept. You even accept the terrible redecoration of the Rose Garden, the kind of Obama.

on pan, flat, umbrellas. Concrete, yellow umbrella everywhere. I tell you what, man.

Some vomited yellow umbrellas all over the rose gun. It's awful. And I know Tim's a big

fan of the gold filigree and everything. We're going to get to that. That has been layered throughout the

White House to really give it that full Trump vibe. I don't hate it precisely. I don't like it.

It's not my thing. But again, it's like, whatever, that's his prerogative. As far as things that he

can do in the White House, I'm happy if he wants to take his time interior decorating. That's like, but this is different. This is, this is different. It's literally, I'm sorry. I know this is going to sound panicky and whatever.

It's literally just destroying a symbol of America and refashioning it in his image in a way that is permanent and kind of gross. I just like, I hate it. So I've been trying to figure out how to articulate it myself. Like on Slack this morning, the images of the e-swing, the face of it being torn down surface yesterday, some photos, I guess, from the Treasury Department, which is right across the alley from the East Wing. And it just kind of hit a note for a lot of people in our Slack. People were really bothered by it. And we're trying to figure out why was it

so bothersome to people. I mean, obviously there's a lot of bad going on in the world. This is, you know, $250 million renovation for a ballroom. It's an edifice. It's not like, you know, humans are dying. But like, it really, it really bothered people on an emotional level. And I was trying to figure out how and why that was. And I think you kind of summarized it, which is it's the fact that it's permanent, that you cannot go back. This person made a decision, didn't even really get proper sign off. It was just like, I'm going to make a ballroom. And that's that.

And we're stuck with it forever. And like, you're not erasing it. You're not going to tear down the ballroom. You might be able to, like, change parts of it. But like, it is there forever. I would read a New Yorker style deep dive into the what the permitting process is like at the White House. I think it's a special one, but yes. You can't do that.

You can't do that in the Capitol. Like, the architect of the Capitol is going to be like, what on earth are you? You're taking down walls? What is what's going on in here? Who is the authority that handles this? Because the other thing is like, it is apparently harder to build an apartment building in Washington, D.C. than it is to demolish part of the White House. Like, you can't build an apartment building that's more than eight floors high or whatever, the ridiculous rules in D.C. are for that.

I think it's 13, right? Because you can't have it higher than the Capitol building or something like that. Sure, sure. Yeah, I just want to be accurate. It's something else, man. It's something else. It's just the visual image of the front loader or whatever that is, tearing big chunks of the White House down.

And all the wreckage kind of strewn about. It was a jarring image. So on the interior decorating front, like, I think Tim's an idiot. And I can't believe he's advocated publicly for all this gold being thrown. about. I liken it to like a young kid who, you know, realizes they can put posters and shit on their wall and then just starts slapping stuff up everywhere. And then suddenly you walk into the room and it's like, there's no cohesion here. This looks insane. What did you do? Like this whole Rose Garden thing where he's got the pictures of the presidents and then they go up

in like a weird angle. It looks so stupid. Like just should have done it in one straight angle. And then Biden's there, but it's actually the auto pen. It's like so stupid and cheesy and dumb. But it's just like there's too much. stuff like it's just too much stuff and uh he needs to be uh less stated and i'm worried about the ballroom i got to be honest because i don't think it's just going to be chandeliers and windows and tables i feel like he's going to put some random ass shit in there and so i have a list of my head of the stuff he might actually do and on top of it i think he's going to put a golf simulator in there i honestly do okay i mean just or punting green or something but if you you know you could have

little you could have tournaments in there you could have the staff could come in and have long drive tournaments i bet john daily would show up you could totally you know this this feels like you could you i could see that happening sure i could see that have you seen that have you ever seen the white house movie theater it's small i but it's no i've always i've always wanted to make a trip there that would be great it's kind of cool it's like your classic sort of like small room with seating that goes down nice seats and then just a projection screen but i bet if you wanted to he can make a super nice one so you could put an iMacs in there maybe maybe he could make an iMacs in there maybe maybe he could make an iMac screen it's going to be huge that's the only thing about ballroom it's going to be like as i

understand it's significantly bigger than the actual east wing itself it's just going to just be enormous and i don't know what kind of you can't have a small ballroom sam that would be that defeats the purpose of having a ballroom a moderately sized bar room do you think you'll be able to rent out the ballroom for weddings do you think that would like the if you if you wanted to if you wanted to get married at the white house you know you for the right price if you if you contribute to I can actually get maybe a few bar mitzvahs in there too if you really want to go crazy how much trump gold do I have to buy to get a wedding in the white house that's what I want to know if if I buy a bar of trump gold how many bars do I need to give him the bar of gold if you want to get the bar mitzvah

all right let's get into the cinema uh so the destruction of the of the east wing by trumped another slack discussion about prior depictions of the white house being destroyed and there are a few movies in which it is destroyed but you have a distinction between obliteration and just damage right right i think you have to draw a distinction here between like an attack that happens inside the white house versus an independence day style destruction of the way because that is the that is the gold standard here that is the number a number one depiction of destruction of the white house british 1812 style independent yeah you're coming down yeah it was I mean, remember, this is one of my favorite advertising campaigns of all time because I think

it was a Super Bowl ad where they just showed the White House being destroyed and they were like, Independence Day and people were like, I'm going to go see that movie. And then everyone went to go see the movie seven months later. That ad stuck with them so tightly. But no, that was another era when you could do ads seven months in advance and people get hyped. When's the last time we had? I mean, honestly, for me is maybe the inception trailer where I was like, oh, I'm going to definitely see that. I'm definitely seeing that. The inception trailer, I think the first Star Wars sequel, the Star Wars Force Awakened. That was a big one.

People heard the music. They heard the John Williams score and they saw a Han solo and he said, we're back. And it is like, oh, yeah, we are back. We're back, maybe. It's Star Wars. Back to the White House being absolutely destroyed and obliterate or just damage from within. So one of the good ones. We had a little bit of an argument about this in Slack.

I am a big fan of Olympus has fallen. I think you are not. No, no, no, no, you are. I like it. I like it. The other one I, which one is the one with the one with the Gerard Butler? So, Gerard Butler's Olympus has fallen. Yes, I like that one.

There was the Jamie Fox and Channing Tatum White House Down, which is not as... Can you explain? I don't want to go on an aside here, but why is it always the case that, like, two of the same movies come out? This happens regularly, right? It's real Dante's Peak Volcano Deaconne situation. No, it was a, you know, things, ideas swirl around. People, people just grab them, you know. Do the studios know that another studio's got something coming?

Sure. And they'll race to get them out. This happened with DreamWorks and Pixar, the ants versus a bug's life. Jeffrey Katzenberg was like, we're getting our movie out before Pixar. And they did it. They did it.

No, but Olympus's Fallen is great. It's directed by Antoine Fuqua, who is, I love a lot of his stuff. But it has this weirdly realistic assault on the White House, as long as you can imagine the North Koreans pulling it off. As long as you're like, yes, I believe a crack squad of North Korean commandos could do this, but like, set that. It was a little bit crazy, though, because if I'm recalling correctly, they're in this, like, insanely massive plane that just can't be taken

down. It's like a, yeah, it's like an AC130 gun ship that they got something. Yeah, and they just fly in there and no one can do anything. They're like shooting at it, but it's just like deflecting bullets and so. It's like, can we really not take that thing down? But lo and behold, the North Greens have figured it out and it gets in there. But anyways, putting that aside, yes, it's a good one. And I, I much prefer that to White House down, which, again, that movie was too silly. You didn't have the North Korean AC-130 gunship. Then there was, there's 2012, which, Roland Emberich shows up a lot in this list, by the way.

Roland Emmerich, Independence Day fame. He also did 2012 and White House Down. Those were his. In 2012, the apocalypse run, right? Yes. Remember when people thought the world was going to end in 2012? Was that because, the Mayan prophecy? Yeah, there was like Mayan shit.

Yeah. That was so stupid. All right. But there was a. another one, right? Wasn't there another apocalypse one where like everyone freezes? Oh, that was the day after tomorrow. Doesn't the Wados get fucked in that one too or now? Am I crazy? I can't remember. Maybe it just got real cold there. Maybe it just froze. I don't know. Yeah, like the way the tsunami comes in and then the world stops turning and everything freezes. Something like that. I guess we put that in

the destruction, not demolition. Let's not forget Geostorm. Geostorm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. All right. So what else do we have? Earth versus the flying saucer. Earth versus the flying saucers. I get there's, I think there's a lot of these 50s kind of creature feature alien invasion ones where you have like you can see the string come in with the ship and it's you know little animated beams and then boom it blows up i like a good action set piece set in the white house so x2 is the x-men movie where a night roller attacks the white house like goes into the white house and is hopping around with his teleportation power and it i remember that one yeah in the secret service house to like protect it yeah it was that that's that's a that's a really good one just

G.I. Joe retaliation. Interesting, interesting one where it has a lot of relevant to this conversation, a lot of redecoration in that one. They put the, they put the Cobra eyes down in front of the White House. And, you know, it's like, it's rebranded as Cobra. We could get some of those in the ballroom, I bet. Don't give Trump ideas here. Jesus. We're going to have, like, absolutely going to have G.I. Joe decorations on the East Wing after this. All right. So if you have to recommend one film above all others for White House destruction or demolition scene. I think I got to go with Independence Day. It's such a classic. I mean, Independence Day is number one. It is the best. I do have a very big soft spot for Olympus's Fallen. That, that, that, that, that, that respond to a whole series. There's a whole has fallen series. There was a TV show. Last question. Last question. Who is the, because I have,

debate, but like the best cinematic depiction of a president. Is it Bill Pullman? I don't know. Yes. He's pretty good. I mean, he flies the airplane. He leads the air assault on the, on the, on the ships I like I don't think like Harrison Ford do that in Air Force One too or am I misremembering well Air Force One the airplane gets hijacked he's on the airplane and it gets hijacked and he does stick around to fight Gary Oldman's band of terrorists which is great for him he didn't he doesn't flee when he could he stays to save his family and that's great good for him and we did have a real interesting run of like almost superhero presidents in the mid the mid to late 90s a lot of like what a name

to make what are we what is america it's it's 1995 we don't know what we're doing in the world how about superhero president sure why not yeah man the speed the bill of public speech in independence day still what a speech we need that we need that all right sonny thank you for doing this man appreciate it uh there's a lot of fun for us for a story that started with a sadness over the destruction of the east wing but we'll see how this renovation goes i'm sure tim's thrilled by it Thank you.