first lady

WASHINGTON — Betty Ford reportedly said that if the White House West Wing is the “mind” of the nation, then the East Wing — the traditional power center for first ladies — is the “heart.”

That “heart” beat for more than 100 years as first ladies and their teams worked from their East Wing offices on everything from stopping drug abuse and boosting literacy to beautifying and preserving the White House itself. It’s where they planned White House state dinners and brainstormed the elaborate themes that are a feature of the U.S. holiday season.

That history came to an end after wrecking crews tore down the wing’s two stories of offices and reception rooms this month. Gone is an in-house movie theater, as well as a covered walkway to the White House captured in so many photos over the years. An East Wing garden that was dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy was uprooted, photographs show.

President Trump ordered the demolition as part of his still-to-be approved plan to build a $300-million ballroom.

The Republican former real estate developer has long been fixated on building a big White House ballroom. In 2010, he called a top advisor to then-President Obama and offered to build one. Trump made no secret of his distaste for the practice of hosting elegant White House state dinners underneath tents on the South Lawn. The Obama White House did not follow up on his request.

Now Trump, in his second term, is moving quickly to see his wish for what he calls a “great legacy project” become reality. He has tried to justify the East Wing tear-down and his ballroom plans by noting that some of his predecessors also added to the White House over the years.

First ladies and their staffs witnessed history in the East Wing, a “place of purpose and service,” said Anita McBride, who worked there as chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush.

“Tearing down those walls doesn’t diminish the significance of the work we accomplished there,” McBride told the Associated Press.

McBride said she supports a ballroom addition because the “large and expensive tent option” that has been used when guest lists stretched longer than could be comfortably accommodated inside the White House “was not sustainable.” Tents damage the lawn and require additional infrastructure to be brought in, such as outdoor bathrooms and trolleys to move people around, especially in bad weather, she said.

Others feel differently.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who was policy director for First Lady Michelle Obama, said the demolition was a “symbolic blow” to the East Wing’s legacy as a place where women made history.

“The East Wing was this physical space that had seen the role of the first lady evolve from a social hostess into a powerful advocate on a range of issues,” she said in an interview.

Here’s a look at some of the history that came out of the East Wing and the first ladies who spent time there:

Rosalynn Carter

She was the first first lady to have her own office in the East Wing. Most first ladies before Carter had worked out of the private living quarters on the second or third floor of the residence. Carter wanted a place where she could separate work and home.

“I always need a place to go that is private, where I don’t have to dress and don’t have to put on makeup,” she wrote in her memoir. “The offices of the staff of the first lady were always in the East Wing, and it seemed a perfect place for my office too.”

In her memoir, Carter wrote about her favorite route to her office in winter months. She walked through the basement, past laundry rooms and workshops and the bomb shelter kept for the president and his staff. The thermostats in the residence above had been turned down low because of President Carter’s energy conservation program, making the East Wing so cold that she was forced to wear long underwear.

The subterranean passageway shown to her by a residence staffer provided some relief. “With Jimmy’s energy conservation program, it was the only really warm place in the White House, with large steam pipes running overhead,” the first lady wrote.

Nancy Reagan

Photos from the East Wing in the early 1980s show the first lady meeting with staff, including her press secretary, Sheila Tate. For a generation of Americans, Nancy Reagan was most closely associated with a single phrase, “Just Say No,” for the anti-drug abuse program she made a hallmark of her White House tenure.

As Reagan once recalled, the idea for the campaign emerged during a 1982 visit with schoolchildren in Oakland. “A little girl raised her hand and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.’ And there it was born.”

Hillary Clinton

Clinton bucked history by becoming the first first lady to insist that her office be in the West Wing, not the East Wing. In her memoir, Clinton wrote that she wanted her staff to be “integrated physically” with the president’s team. The first lady’s office relocated to what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building while Clinton was assigned an office on the second floor of the West Wing.

“This was another unprecedented event in White House history and quickly became fodder for late-night comedians and political pundits,” Clinton later wrote.

Laura Bush

Bush wrote in her memoir about what it was like at the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of her staff members, in their 20s, “kicked off their high heels and fled from the East Wing” after they were told to “run for their lives” when reports suggested the White House was a target, she wrote.

“Now they were being asked to come back to work in a building that everyone considered a target and for a presidency and a country that would be at war.”

Michelle Obama

Obama was the first Black woman to serve as first lady, becoming a global role model and style icon who advocated for improved child nutrition through her “Let’s Move” initiative. She and her staff in the East Wing also worked to support military families and promote higher education for girls in developing countries.

Photos from the time show Obama typing on a laptop during an online chat about school nutrition and the White House garden she created.

Melania Trump

Trump pushed the boundaries of serving as first lady by not living at the White House during the opening months of President Trump’s first term. She stayed in New York with their then-school-age son, Barron, so he wouldn’t have to switch schools midyear. When she eventually moved to the White House, she and her East Wing aides launched an initiative called “Be Best,” focused on child well-being, opioid abuse and online safety.

Jill Biden

Biden was the first first lady to continue a career outside the White House. The longtime community college English professor taught twice a week while serving as first lady. But in her East Wing work, she was an advocate for military families; her late father and her late son Beau served in the military. Biden also advocated for research into a cure for cancer and secured millions of dollars in federal funding for research into women’s health.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The entire White House East Wing has been demolished as President Trump moves forward with a ballroom construction, Associated Press photos on Thursday showed.

The East Wing, where first ladies created history, planned state dinners and promoted causes, is now history itself. The two-story structure of drawing rooms and offices, including workspace for first ladies and their staffs, has been turned into rubble, demolished as part of the Republican president’s plan to build what he said is now a $300-million ballroom nearly twice the size of the White House.

Trump said Wednesday that keeping the East Wing would have “hurt a very, very expensive, beautiful building” that he said presidents have wanted for years.

He said “me and some friends of mine” will pay for the ballroom at no cost to taxpayers.

Trump allowed the demolition to begin this week despite not yet having approval from the relevant government agencies with jurisdiction over construction on federal property.

Preservationists have also urged the Trump administration to halt the demolition until plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom can go through the required public review process.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

PARIS — A lawyer for France ‘s first couple said they’ll be seeking “substantial” damages from U.S. conservative influencer Candace Owens if she persists with claims that President Emmanuel Macron ‘s wife, Brigitte, is a man.

The lawyer, Tom Clare, said in an interview with CNN that a defamation suit filed Wednesday for the Macrons in a Delaware court was “really a last resort” after a fruitless yearlong effort to engage with Owens and requests that she “do the right thing: tell the truth, stop spreading these lies.”

“Each time we’ve done that, she mocked the Macrons, she mocked our efforts to set the record straight,” Clare said. “Enough is enough, it was time to hold her accountable.”

The Macrons have been married since 2007, and Emmanuel Macron has been France’s president since 2017.

In a YouTube video, Owens called the suit an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy,” and said the first lady is “a very goofy man.”

Owens is a right-leaning political commentator whose YouTube channel has about 4.5 million subscribers. In 2024, she was denied a visa from New Zealand and Australia, citing remarks in which she denied Nazi medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II.

The 219-page complaint against Owens lays out “extensive evidence” that Brigitte Macron “was born a woman, she’s always been a woman,” the couple’s attorney said.

“We’ll put forward our damage claim at trial, but if she continues to double down between now and the time of trial, it will be a substantial award,” he said.

In Paris, the presidential office had no immediate comment.

In France, too, the presidential couple has for years been dogged by conspiracy theories that Brigitte was born as a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux, who supposedly then took the name Brigitte as a transgender woman. Jean-Michel Trogneux is, in fact, Brigitte’s brother.

Last September, Brigitte and Jean-Michel Trogneux won a defamation suit against two women who were sentenced by a Paris court to fines and damages for spreading the claims about the first lady online. A Paris appeals court overturned the ruling earlier this month. Brigitte and her brother have since turned to France’s highest court to appeal that decision, according to French media.

The Macrons first met at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher. Brigitte Macron was then Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children.

Macron, 47, is serving his second and last term as president. The first lady celebrated her 72nd birthday in April.

Macron moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.

Their relationship came under the spotlight in May when video images showed Brigitte pushing her husband away with both hands on his face before they disembarked from a plane on a tour of Southeast Asia.

Macron later dismissed the incident as play-fighting, telling reporters that “we are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” and that it had been overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump, alongside his wife, Melania, on Monday signed the Take It Down Act, a measure the first lady helped usher through Congress to set stricter penalties for the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery online, or “revenge porn.”

In March, Melania Trump used her first public appearance since resuming the role of first lady to travel to Capitol Hill to lobby House members to pass the bill following its approval by the Senate.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier Monday that the first lady was “instrumental in getting this important legislation passed.”

The bill makes it a federal crime to “knowingly publish” or threaten to publish intimate images without a person’s consent, including AI-created “deepfakes.” Websites and social media companies will be required to remove such material within 48 hours after a victim requests it. The platforms must also take steps to delete duplicate content.

Many states have already banned the dissemination of sexually explicit deepfakes or revenge porn, but the Take It Down Act is a rare example of federal regulators imposing on internet companies.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, passing the House in April by a 409-2 vote and clearing the Senate by unanimous consent.

But the measure isn’t without critics. Free speech advocates and digital rights groups say the bill is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, including legal pornography and LGBTQ+ content. Others say it could allow the government to monitor private communications and undermine due process.

The first lady appeared at a Capitol Hill roundtable with lawmakers and young women who had explicit images of them put online, saying it was “heartbreaking” to see what teenagers and especially girls go through after this happens to them. She also included a victim among her guests for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress the day after that meeting.

After the House passed the bill, Melania Trump called the bipartisan vote a “powerful statement that we stand united in protecting the dignity, privacy and safety of our children.”

Her advocacy for the bill is a continuation of the Be Best campaign she started in the president’s first term, focusing on children’s well-being, social media use and opioid abuse.

In his speech to Congress in March, the president said the publication of such imagery online is “just terrible” and that he looked forward to signing the bill into law.

“And I’m going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don’t mind,” he said. There’s nobody who “gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”

Superville writes for the Associated Press.