"During my eight years in the White House, although there was a lot of attention given to my fashion, my physical appearance, all of that, I made it a point to shy away from that conversation, because I was worried that it would become a distraction," Obama told Roberts of why she chose now, nearly one decade later, to open up on the topic.

The most sweeping intervention before Trump’s was the Truman Reconstruction of 1948–1952, a project so ambitious that only the White House’s iconic exterior walls were left standing. By 1948, decades of patchwork repairs, design flaws and war damage left the mansion structurally unsound, according to the White House Historical Association.