The White House covered the North Portico with large tarps on Thursday, turning a routine repair job into a visible change on one of the building’s most familiar fronts. The tarps showed images of the columns underneath, while scaffolding that had stood for days disappeared from view.
The work is on the White House Columns at the North Portico, where a White House official said the stones are undergoing standard restoration. Doug Burgum told Katie Miller earlier this week that the repairs would be finished very quickly, and Trump said workers had taken about 150 years of paint off the columns and re-did them. He also said the columns were in very bad shape and had been treated very badly by a lot of presidents.
That explanation matters because the tarps arrived as a new visual marker of construction around Washington, D.C., where Trump has launched several building and renovation projects in his second term. Crews began work last week on a previously unannounced helipad on the White House’s South Lawn, while contractor records obtained by the Washington Post showed the project was sped up and that $875,000 was added to the bill in anticipation of an upcoming state visit.
The North Portico work is being described as standard restoration, but it sits alongside a broader and more aggressive push that has altered other parts of the capital. Trump began a controversial White House ballroom project with the demolition of the East Wing earlier this year, and the ballroom is reportedly expected to cost $600 million, with more than half of that coming from taxpayer money. At the same time, the Kennedy Center has been wrapped in its own tarps for nearly a month, with a federal judge last month ordering it to explain the purpose of the coverings by the end of July.
For now, the White House is saying the North Portico job should wrap up quickly. What remains unclear is how much of the stonework is being replaced and whether the tarps over the columns will be one more brief cover-up in a season of high-profile construction, or simply the most visible one.
