The famously left-leaning New York Times has published an opinion piece saying that Donald Trump's demolition of the White House's East Wing 'needed to happen' - while blasting President Barack Obama's under-construction Presidential Library as 'ugly and intimidating.' Columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Obama's library on Chicago's South Side is 'architectural vainglory battening on presidential ego, inappropriate to its setting, unmoored from memory and tradition.' Unlike the obtrusive Obama obelisk, the ballroom's design 'is perfectly in keeping with the character of the White House complex,' he wrote. 'It's also because no matter how tight the link between progress and development, it just doesn't feel like progress to live under a baleful shadow like the one that Obama’s presidential monument will cast,' he wrote. The Obama Foundation secured the public land for its project from the city of Chicago for just $10 in 2018.
