Donald Trump Might Have To Wait A Year To Occupy The Oval Office
Randy DeSoto
... Deep Underground Command Center beneath the West Wing ...
Though Donald Trump won the presidential election, he might not be occupying the Oval Office any time soon.
According to former top George W. Bush White House adviser Karl Rove, the most famous office space in the world is due for renovations that could put it out of commission for nearly a year.
Rove told Fox News on Wednesday the Oval Office will undergo security upgrades that require to be stripped bare.
“My understanding is that for the first year of his time in office, President Trump will not have the Oval Office,” he said.
“President Obama could have told the Secret Service, ‘I know you want to modernize the Oval Office with security enhancements — literally strip it down to the bare walls and build it back up so we’ve got bullet-proof glass and so forth and so on, security arrangements in it, in my last year in office,'” Rove said.
“But instead he said, ‘Why don’t you do that [with] whoever comes next,’ so the president of the United States, President Trump, my understanding is, will spend most of his first year using Richard Nixon’s old office in the Old Executive Office Building across executive drive and up the Navy steps,” the Fox News commentator added.
The Daily Mail reported that Rove was referring to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is across the street from the West Wing, where the Oval Office is located.
Image credit: Google Maps
Real Clear Politics reported in February 2013 that a replica of the Oval Office housed in EEOB was slated to be completed by the summer of that year.
However, according to the White House website, the plan to make a replica Oval Office was scrapped and West Wing renovations have been underway for the past few years. Whether the Oval Office work has been finished is not clear.
Additionally, construction of a Deep Underground Command Center beneath the West Wing, first proposed in 1963, has been underway since 2010 and might now be completed.
Trump would not be the first president to be displaced by White House renovations. The Executive Mansion was fully gutted in 1949 and underwent three years of reconstruction during which President Harry Truman lived in the nearby Blair House.
If President Trump is required to work from the EEOB, he will have easy access to it through an intricate tunnel system that connects the White House with it and other nearby government buildings.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/donald-trump-might-have-to-wait-a-year-to-occupy-the-oval-office/