The Bloated Trump Ballroom Is Paused for Now

The very fine Building (latest edition).
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Well, the White House ballroom is on hold at least for a moment. Judge Richard G. Leon yesterday ruled in favor of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop President Donald Trump from constructing his overscale new East Wing at the White House. Trump does indeed need to get congressional approval to build this thing, wrote the judge, explaining straightforwardly that the president is merely the steward of the White House. The opinion is entertainingly packed with exclamation points, including “He is not, however, the owner!” and “Construction has to stop!” And stop it did, however briefly. Trump’s completely sane social-media response, in his quasi-Teutonic lawyer mode of arbitrary capitalization, called the Trust “a Radical Left Group of Lunatics” that was opposed to “a Ballroom that … will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World.” He also took it as an opportunity to again attack the Fed chair Jerome Powell, and for some reason Gavin Newsom, once again demonstrating the concept of dementia-related perseveration. As occurred with the tariff plan, the court has put a brake on Trump’s bulldozer methods by ruling that Congress has a little bit of control to assert here, which puts on the table the possibility that it could, you know, do so. Let a nation dream!

Whether he believed it or not, Trump perhaps grasped the possibility of this in advance. That is surely why he ripped down the East Wing so fast: As I’ve noted, “anticipatory demolition” is a well-established chess move to get ahead of the preservationists. Besides, just as the cruelty is the point of everything this administration does so, too, is the hastiness. One big piece of whatever remains of Trump’s appeal is that he is, to use the Silicon Valley vernacular, willing to move fast and break things. Trump has a child’s attention span, a megalomaniac’s urge for a ribbon cutting before his term ends, zero willingness to listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with him, and — most of all — an unshakable belief that his taste and judgment is far better than any arts commission’s. (Again: “finest Building of its kind anywhere in the world.”) His legal stance is that, since it is being built with private money, nobody but him has to approve anything. That it is on historic public land, and is a piece of the White House, goes unremarked. So does, for example, the part of the planning we can’t see, like the security system, which apparently is being burrowed in underneath the new structure. (There is no risk in rushing that, none at all.) To normies, this abrogation of procedure and consensus is the route to a shitty, substandard building. To him, it is not a bug but a feature.

As he sluices through these rubber-stamp approvals, what is he doing with the actual design? Making it too big, of course. The new wing is, in its current form, now 60 percent larger than the historic Executive Mansion. The ballroom already looks blocky and graceless in the renderings, which hints that it will be a bulky blob of AI slop in the real world. But hey, the thing keeps changing! Yesterday, after the New York Times ran a big story about how awkward those renderings looked — especially the steps on the south front that do not lead to an entrance at the top, a literal stairway to nowhere — he showed us an update. “We just got these in from the architects,” he said, holding up a poster showing that the steps had been lopped off, leaving a blunt face below the south colonnade.

The National Capital Planning Commission has dominion over all White House construction and will vote on the plans today. Somewhat surprisingly Trump at least nominally consulted it before setting the backhoes to work, and the group managed to get him to take off the pediment that made this thing even taller. Still, judging by its previous actions and its Trump-appointed leadership, it is almost sure to approve everything. Then, presumably, Congress will be the holdup, although (again, judging by its record when it comes to everything else Trump does) not much of one. Most likely, Republican House leadership will quickly whip together a vote to grant Trump the authority to build, perhaps before sunset. He claims construction will begin “in the spring.”

Also? The project’s budget has quietly been revised from $200 million to $400 million. Lots more donors will now be able to buy access to the man and curry his favor. But he is running the country like a businessman, so it’s okay.

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