Former First Kids Whine About the White House
Now that the East Wing is gone, Chelsea Clinton and Patti Davis have written op-eds to lament all the precious history that Donald Trump has wantonly destroyed.
Come July 4, 2026, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. It has already been 250 years since the first shots were fired to launch the Revolutionary War, the original No Kings rally. Ever since America’s birth, the struggle has been between Liberty and tyranny. In modern America, we stand firmly on the side of Liberty, approaching 30 years of tirelessly advocating for the First Principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution.
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On the opposite side, working for tyranny and all manner of constitutional destruction, are American leftists. They tear down the walls of the Rule of Law as they erect a system of class-, race-, and sex-based redistribution and favoritism. There are no “norms” they haven’t assaulted on their way to “progress.”
To listen to them in the last week, however, you’d think the East Wing of the White House was the last bastion of “democracy,” and its fall marked a new Dark Ages brought on by the Bad Orange Man.
Donald Trump has embarked on his effort to construct a Big Beautiful Ballroom in place of the old East Wing. Indeed, the old East Wing is gone now. Our Sophie Starkova and Thomas Gallatin aptly covered different aspects of this brouhaha last week.
My interest today is the supposed moral high ground of a couple of high-profile complainants: Patti Davis and Chelsea Clinton. Both former first daughters wrote op-eds complaining about Trump’s project.
I’ll start with Clinton because her op-ed came first, and, frankly, it’ll be more fun to tear it down. Chelsea is about six months younger than I am, so my own political awareness grew just before she took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for what she called her “formative years.”
It seems that only one of us gained any self-awareness.
You see, Clinton’s subheader begins with her last sentence: “What was dismantled today isn’t just marble or plaster; it is a reflection of how easily history can be erased when power forgets purpose.” Clinton hails from the side of the political aisle that is tearing down statues all over the country because the people who have gained power want to rewrite history to advance their own narrative.
She opens with this line: “The White House belongs to the American people, and that’s why we call it the People’s House. I never forgot that.” To be sure, Chelsea is not responsible for the sins of her parents, but Bill Clinton sullied the White House in ways that defy description in a family publication. And Hillary Clinton stole from the People’s House on her way resentfully out the door in 2001.
Chelsea swears up and down that “I never once thought, ‘this is my house’ in the way my friends thought of theirs.” I can’t read her mind, but I highly doubt that a teenage girl could consistently be as pure as the wind-driven snow while living with her co-president parents.
She tells stories that I don’t doubt are true — the tours given by Barbara Bush in 1992, and then the tours she helped give to Jenna and Barbara Bush eight years later. The friendship between the Clintons and the Bushes is well-documented. The irony there, however, is that such Uniparty sentiments partly explain Trump’s rise. Many Americans got tired of the phony baloney get-along attitude that too many Republicans had toward the Democrats, who were openly destroying our institutions.
Clinton continues by acknowledging that many other presidents, including her dad, made changes to the White House. Where Trump went wrong, she argues, is his alleged failure to consult historians. She doesn’t doubt his authority, only his “stewardship.”
“A disregard for history is a defining trait of President Trump’s second administration,” she writes. “This is what happens when we take a wrecking ball to our heritage.” Trump, she argues, shows a disregard for “our democratic institutions and the rule of law.”
As I began, leftists are the ones who disregard history while destroying the institutions of our Republic.
Now, let’s move on to Patti Davis, the now-73-year-old daughter of the great Ronald Reagan. She was 28 when her father began his first term, but in her op-ed, she calls herself “the rebellious first daughter who didn’t want to be first daughter.” It’s certainly understandable that she didn’t want “armed agents following me and reporters writing about me,” though she brought some of it on herself with her liberal activism that made life difficult for her father.
She changed her name to Davis, her mother Nancy’s maiden name, to differentiate herself from her father. That’s an odd way to preserve history.
Davis admits to being “swept up in my own personal drama” and “blind” to her surroundings at the White House until she returned to the historic building after Ronald Reagan’s death. Notably, she says she entered “through the East Wing” — as if to lend weight to what she and the nation have personally lost. She calls the demolition images “heartbreaking” because, while previous presidents made changes, “this is complete destruction.”
Well, right now it literally is. Nothing new has been built yet, for Pete’s sake.
What all the leftist hysteria over the White House building illustrates is that they have an incredibly skewed view of what’s important. I respect the fact that both Chelsea Clinton and Patti Davis were members of first families, but our Republic does not depend on anyone’s loyalty to a wing of a building. Our nation will survive as a bastion of Liberty for future generations only if current generations revere the Constitution and the Rule of Law with real determination — not the ginned-up outrage currently dominating media coverage.
