There’s something more sinister beneath Trump’s White House ballroom obsession.

This is Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. Click here to receive it in your inbox each week.

Before we get started, I wanted to draw your attention to Slate’s coverage of what might just be the Supreme Court’s worst ruling in a century, and how the gerrymandering wars are just beginning.

President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear he really wants a ballroom at the White House, so much so that, after experiencing his third assassination attempt since 2024 over the weekend, he took the opportunity to plug his pet project: “This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom,” he said on Truth Social. Two days later, the political theater continued with Justice Department lawyers filing a motion basically written in the voice of Trump himself. It accused the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the group suing to stop Trump’s ballroom, of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” while also touting Trump as “a highly successful real estate developer” who obviously knows what he’s doing, and demanded the injunction be lifted so construction could resume.
All of this fresh momentum even convinced Congressional Republicans to introduce legislation to fund the ballroom.

What should one make of all this? A new White House ballroom is a hill Trump is willing to die on, despite a tanking approval rating and the looming possibility of losing his House and Senate majority. A YouGov survey from October showed 61 percent of U.S. adults did not approve of the ballroom construction, while the National Capital Planning Commission, a government group that oversees planning of federal buildings and land in Washington, received over 32,000 comments from the public that overwhelmingly opposed it. Some commenters likened the ballroom’s aesthetic to a “brothel” or “Vegas casino.”

Since the start of 2026, the White House ballroom has become a topic Trump is so fixated with that he can’t seem to stop talking about it. Trump has mentioned the ballroom on about the same number of days as other topics like health insurance and affordability, according to a Washington Post analysis. And during a meeting in early January with oil and gas executives that was supposed to be about rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry, Trump apparently digressed yet again into talking about the ballroom. “This is the door to the ballroom,” he said, pointing to the future entrance to the $400 million addition to the White House, elaborating on all the bells and whistles the building will have.

He first announced the project last summer, claiming it would solve the pesky problem of hosting large groups of guests at the White House, to the supposed benefit of “future Administrations and the American people.” The ballroom will be roughly 90,000 square feet “of ornately designed and carefully crafted space” that can seat about 650 people. It began construction in September, and by October, the entire East Wing had been demolished.

However, in December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the federal government, arguing in a complaint that Trump can’t simply tear down parts of the White House “without any review whatsoever” and, because this is all technically happening on public property, can’t continue “without giving the public an opportunity to weigh in.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon agreed with National Trust, issuing a preliminary injunction in April to stop any further construction of Trump’s ballroom and concluding that Congress must first authorize any new construction of the White House and establish how it will be funded.
The Justice Department has insisted that preexisting laws give the president direct authorization to build the ballroom using private donor funds, and after Saturday’s assassination attempt, it expanded its argument to include the safety of the president.

Trump has shown he has no interest in seeking real approval from Congress for anything on his agenda, adopting the unitary executive theory that holds that presidents singularly control everything within the executive branch. It’s why Trump never bothered to get congressional approval before starting a war with Iran, capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, or gutting federal agencies like the Education Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and others. And he admitted as much, wrongly proclaiming on Truth Social that congressional approval had never been given over construction projects at the White House.

Yet Congress is the one who authorized the very creation of the White House through legislation, in the Residence Act of 1790. As Judge Leon noted in his opinion, “Congress has continued to authorize and fund construction and maintenance at the White House up until the present day.”

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century

There’s Something More Sinister Beneath Trump’s Ballroom Obsession

Things are not going well for Trump all around at this moment in his presidency, and the ballroom project should be the least of his concerns. The ongoing Iran war has split Trump’s most ardent supporters, caused gas prices to rise to over $4 a gallon, and pushed inflation to its highest level in nearly two years. About 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict in Iran—coincidentally, the exact same percentage of people who disapprove of the ballroom. This is in addition to the tariff whiplash Trump caused, which is now forcing small and large businesses to fight for refunds.

But sure, focus on a ballroom that the average American will never get access to, and that Republicans might force them to pay $400 million for! As Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware put it: “My constituents can’t afford fucking groceries or utility bills, and he now wants to spend taxpayer money on a ballroom?”

The president’s ballroom fixation may not make much political sense, but it sure gives voters one more reason to strip Republicans of their House and Senate majority in the midterms.

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Elsewhere in Jurisprudence

Slate Jurisprudence is on YouTube! Last week, Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern, and Madiba Dennie unpacked Democrats’ recent gerrymandering victory in Virginia, how conservatives brought it upon themselves, and what might happen next with Republicans’ legal challenge against the result.

You can watch the episode here:

As I briefly mentioned at the top of this newsletter, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday that guts the remaining tenets of the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voters. The conservative majority eviscerated Section 2, which provided a pathway for voters of color to ensure they had fair representation in state and federal offices. The court’s latest decision is the “culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito,” wrote friend of Slate Rick Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. The two justices “have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgement that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation.”

When the Supreme Court published its devastating decision in Louisiana v. Callais, it also gave Texas the green light to gerrymander its electoral maps for the upcoming midterm elections. Texas was one of the first states to attempt midcycle redistricting as Republicans in Washington concocted a plan to increase the number of red seats in the House in order to protect their current slim majority. Though a district court concluded Texas had unlawfully rigged the state’s election for Republicans by diluting Black and Hispanic votes with its new maps, the Supreme Court overturned that decision on its shadow docket. As Slate’s Alexis Romero explained, this “issuing [of] a vague decision not only has significant stakes for these midterms but reminds us just how much of a mess the high court has made in this area of the law.”

A small town in Maryland has found an unconventional way to thwart Homeland Security’s national push to stand up detention centers: Snails. Friend of Slate Madeleine O’Neill tells the story of how Attorney General Anthony Brown leveraged federal environmental laws against DHS, taking a cue from grassroots organizations that have spent decades advocating for vulnerable communities facing the unequal effects of pollution and development. Brown filed a lawsuit that argued Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to make environmental assessments before purchasing a warehouse in the state, which happens to be near waters that are home to endangered mussels, snails, and fish.

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