A poet contemplates the demolition of the White House’s East Wing

Shutterstock AI prompted image of a future White House ballroom

As a poet, I’ve been thinking about the place of poetry in modern American discourse—poetry as opposed to journalism. That space feels vanishingly small, and when poetry does enter the public square, it’s almost always through the lens of identity. Only occasionally does a collection break through those bounds to speak to something larger, something about the culture in which that identity takes hold. Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is one of those rare exceptions.

Hayes writes from his own “I”—an African American man looking back across four hundred years of history, from enslavement through Jim Crow to Donald Trump 1.0. He reinvents the sonnet as both container and cage. “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame,” he writes. The form itself becomes America.

I’ve been thinking about Hayes because journalism, with its supposed duty to “cover all sides,” has come to feel like a house fire of its own—each side shouting from a different room. That obligation to balance competing claims, even when one is manifestly false, has failed us. It has failed to capture the moral scale of our national moment, and it has failed to do justice to what’s happening—literally or symbolically—at the White House.

As I write this, the East Wing is being demolished to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, nearly twice the size of the White House itself. The images circulate online: walls reduced to rubble, the grand portico fenced off, the people’s entrance gone. Officials call it a “renovation,” likening it to Obama’s addition of basketball hoops on the tennis court. But the comparison feels obscene.

Historians appear on television, trying to find words for their shock. Lindsay Chervinsky, in a masterclass of understatement, tells Jake Tapper:

“What makes the White House the best home field advantage in the world is that it has such incredible history in its walls... To see a space that has witnessed so much torn down—it’s a surprise.”

Others more bluntly predict that the executive mansion is now destined to become an annex to the ballroom—a gilded stage for the “beautiful people,” the billionaire courtiers. The people’s house remade into a whorehouse of sorts, where payments are made and services rendered.

We’ve heard the administration’s justification: This is just another renovation. But the lie is visible in the wreckage. The bigger the lie, the more brazenly it’s told, the more likely it is to pass as normal. And yet the metaphor is so perfect it’s almost unbearable: the destruction of the East Wing, the most public part of the people’s house—the section where visitors enter, where holidays are celebrated, where First Ladies have held court—mirrors the hollowing out of the republic itself.

We are, as Hayes might say, locked in an American sonnet: part prison, part panic closet, a room in a house set aflame. And yet, the poet in me still looks for meaning in the smoke. Perhaps one day this destruction—literal or figurative—will be seen as the nadir, the dark opposite of the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Perhaps it will mark the moment when the tide began, finally, to turn.

So here is my small offering, sarcastic and nihilistic as it may be. Underneath it all resides my prayer that Americans, MAGA especially, will see this president for what he is—a vile id devouring the body politic:

White House Ball Room

The White House ballroom will be a place
for a certain kind of play. To figure out what kind
you have to find the diamond under the goldleaf!
I’m talking about the playbook mapping out the way

Trump played ball with Epstein. At what inning 
did they start slapping their players’ butts?  
First base, second base, third base…
How long did it take them to go all the way?

God forbid the nations of the world try to take
a knee. They’ll soon be forced to take
two knees. We know how this game is played.

Just look at the hummer they threw to Ghislaine.
Don’t look to any umpire to at least 
ensure that the basic rules are observed.