President Donald Trump in gold-plated Oval Office with rendering of his White House ballroom
The East Wing of the White House was reduced to a pile of rubble last week in a hasty, brutal demolition that shocked the country. Now, it’s time to build President Donald Trump’s big, dumb, gilded bribe palace—but no one knows exactly what that entails.
The New York Times tried to figure this out, looking at the plans—which Trump waved around in the Oval Office—posted on the White House website and a physical model of the ballroom.
And guess what? None of them are the same.
Honestly, of course they aren’t. This is all being done on the fly, subject to Trump’s daily whims. The ballroom could hold 650 people, or maybe 1,350—it’s a mystery! Maybe it will cost $200 million, maybe $300 million. Wait, scratch that—it’s $350 million. Definitely $350 million.
You might find it odd that construction is already starting on a building that has multiple building plans—where one version of the ballroom holds nearly twice the other, with a price tag that increases by about $50 million every time you turn around.
You fool! You rube! You just don’t understand how construction works! Let White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt school you.
“With any construction project, changes come. And we have informed all of you, we've been keeping you apprised of this project. We've shown you the renderings,” she said.Well, yes. It’s the fact that there are renderings plural that is the problem here. All we really know for sure is that it will be 90,000 square feet, or nearly double the size of the White House, which stands at 55,000 square feet—at least until Trump destroyed the East Wing.
Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s garden is also gone, as are two magnolia trees that were planted in the 1940s to honor former Presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And why not? Trump doesn’t want to honor any past presidents. He only wants to honor himself.
Even the small details are inconsistent in Trump’s plans for the ballroom, including the number of decorative columns and staircases. There’s also the small problem of the renderings having physically impossible features, like a stairway to nowhere and overlapping windows.
To be frank, it looks a lot like someone just used AI to render a crappy facsimile of Mar-a-Lago.
Maybe these plans all look like haphazard, slightly different versions of golden crap because McCrery Architects, which is designing the ballroom, mostly builds churches—not ballrooms. However, James McCrery, the firm’s owner, is a hard-right religious zealot and has also designed buildings for Hillsdale College, the right’s beloved ultraconservative school.
But Trump knows that the companies showering him with money for this project don’t actually care about the ballroom's aesthetics or who builds it; it’s just another opportunity to curry favor with the president.
And Trump certainly doesn’t care about quality. He revels in gilded everything, a king in the world’s tackiest castle. He’s created a perfect ecosystem of grift without oversight or public input.
And what do we get? A comically ill-designed piece of garbage where the People’s House used to be.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
- Trump's East Wing demolition isn't a normal White House renovation ›
- Trump's ballroom blitz sparks chorus of disgust: 'The perfect symbol ... ›
- White House East Wing demolished, despite concern : NPR ›
- Trump says 'existing structure' of White House East Wing to be torn ... ›
- Trump says White House renovation is 'music to my ears' as criticism ... ›
- Experts Raise Concerns Over Trump's White House Ballroom ... ›
Start your day with National Memo Newsletter
Know first.
The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning
