'Giant tarp' at White House startles reporters amid Trump update to iconic columns

A "giant tarp" printed to resemble the columns it now covers has been quietly draped over an area of the White House one Trump appointee wants to redo so it will resemble Mar-a-Lago, witnesses reported on Thursday.

Scaffolding at the White House's North Portico entrance was covered Wednesday as construction crews continued a makeover of the 200-year-old structure, according to multiple reporters on the scene.

A White House official told MS NOW correspondent Vaughn Hillyard the draping is for "standard stonework and crack repairs" — and the plan is "presently to keep the columns white."

Descriptions of the tarp varied.

"A giant tarp with a print of the White House North Lawn entrance is now being draped over the construction work being done on the columns," Taylor Popielarz wrote on X.

PBS NewsHour correspondent Liz Landers wrote that workers had dropped "a semi-transparent covering over the side closest to the West Wing."

"It reveals the President's new design," Kellie Meyer, a NewsNation White House correspondent, wrote on X.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum provided an update to Trump ally and podcaster Katie Miller.

"President Trump comes out to greet a world leader, sees door dings in the pillars, and says, 'Look at all this stuff that needs to be repaired,'" he reportedly said. "We're restoring the plaster, and not just at the door level — all the way up to the crowns of those towers."

At a May law enforcement dinner, Trump said he would normally have called the building "a s—t house," claiming "the columns were falling down" and "the plaster was falling off."

The work is unfolding as Trump's appointee to chair the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., has proposed swapping the North Portico's Ionic columns for the more ornate Corinthian style — the same style Trump uses at Mar-a-Lago and has handpicked for his $400 million White House ballroom, first reported by The Washington Post.

Bruce Redman Becker, an architect and former Commission of Fine Arts member removed by Trump, called the proposal "a completely inappropriate idea and at odds with universally held historic preservation standards," the Post reported.

"It's like surgically adding or removing a couple of inches to one of your legs, thinking that you could still walk," said Steven Semes, a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, according to The Washington Post. "It becomes a very different animal."

The column wrap is not the first tarp to shroud a landmark in Trump's Washington. A building wrap went up over the Kennedy Center's façade in June, hiding the removal of Trump's name from the building after a federal court ordered it taken down, National Public Radio reported.

New York Times photographer Doug Mills called Wednesday's covering a "shroud." Popielarz was keeping a wider count.

"Crane on the right is part of the helipad project. Crane on the left is part of the ballroom project. Tarp (with column prints) on the lower left is now covering the North Lawn column project," he wrote.