Shocked Trump destroying history? He did the same by building Trump Tower.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s willingness to demolish history that stands in the way of his construction plans did not develop recently with the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, but dates back decades to when he built Trump Tower in New York.

Trump destroyed two famous Art Deco friezes, reneging on his promise to preserve them, to avoid a slight delay in the construction of his Midtown skyscraper in 1980, offering a preview of his promise to build a massive ballroom on the South Lawn.

“It will not interfere with the current building. It will be close to it but not touching it,” Trump said in July.

Those words ended up meaningless, and the east wing was completely demolished Thursday afternoon.

“We determined that after a tremendous amount of study with some of the best architects in the world, we decided to tear it down, trying to use a small section; you know, the East Wing wasn’t much, there wasn’t much left of the original,” he said in a rambling, rambling response to reporters at the White House on Wednesday while showing off an artist’s renderings. “It was a very small building. And rather than let that damage a very expensive, beautiful building that, frankly, they’ve been looking for for years. You’ve got it. I brought this in so people could see it. But, you know, there’s a relative, no one’s actually seen anything like it. I think it’s going to be one of the great ballrooms in the world.”

The co-author of one of Trump’s books with him, Charles Leerhsen, said Trump’s bait-and-switch should have been expected.

“I’m not surprised at all that he went back on his word about the east wing. What would be surprising would be if he ever told the truth,” Leerhsen said.

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The sequence of events is almost identical to the destruction of a pair of Art Deco friezes that adorned the Bonwit Teller department store building in 1980. The year before, Trump had agreed to preserve the artwork when he tore down the Fifth Avenue structure he had purchased to make way for his planned Trump Tower building.

Instead of carefully removing the friezes and donating them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as he had said he would, he had his work crews demolish them with jackhammers.

Trump later told the New York Times that preserving them would have added two weeks and $32,000 in costs ($125,340 in today’s dollars) to the project. The friezes “lacked artistic merit” and were not worth enough “to justify the effort to save them,” he said, using his false “John Baron” persona.

Trump’s White House advisers have downplayed the demolition of the East Wing, arguing that it has no historical significance because it was not part of the White House as it was originally built in 1800 and that other presidents have also undertaken renovations over the years.

“There have been many presidents in the past who have left their mark on this beautiful White House complex. This briefing room, as everyone knows, was not even a briefing room. It was just a swimming pool,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during her briefing Thursday. “If you look at what President Truman did and some of the photographs of the construction project that took place in those years, I think sitting here today, we are all grateful for those efforts and the modifications that occurred at that time.”

However, the work done by other presidents was largely to repair and restore, not destroy and replace. The $376 billion that President Barack Obama invested in White House projects, for example, went primarily to modernize sewer and telecommunications lines. Many of the articles were recommendations from the commission that studied the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

And the East Wing, although not part of the original White House, was added by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, meaning it had existed for 123 years of the White House’s 225-year total history.

The demolition of much of the current White House is the latest piece of Trump’s reconstruction of a historic government landmark in his personal style. He had already paved Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden and replaced it with a patio and outdoor furniture that looks like that of a budget hotel. And he continues to add gold ornaments and knick-knacks in the Oval Office, much as he did in his Trump Tower penthouse.

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images