Trump To Build Yugest, Tackiest Ballroom At White House Like You Wouldn't Believe

Fulfilling his lifelong dream of making everything look worse.

A golden monstrosity. Also, she’s holding a picture of the White House ballroom.

Fifteen years ago, David Axelrod, who was then a senior adviser to President Obama, got a call from Donald Trump. The cotton-candy-haired real estate developer was offering to build a big, fancy ballroom for the White House, where the largest event space only holds about 200 people for dinner. Bigger events such as state dinners with hundreds of guests require the White House staff to erect tents with flooring on the South Lawn.

Trump supposedly tried to sell Axelrod on the idea that he was the man for the job by pointing to the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, which from every picture we have ever seen looks like an events room at an airport Hilton. But Axelrod was busy at the time, because he worked for a president who took his job seriously and an administration that had much more important things to do than indulge a billionaire with aesthetic taste that would make a Central Asian dictator blanche.

Axelrod passed off the project to someone else and never revisited it. The ballroom never happened, and Trump has been stewing about the slight for a decade and a half. Which seems about right, as the man is made up of nothing but bad cholesterol and old resentments.

Now that Trump is — sigh — living in the White House, he is in a position to build that big, fancy ballroom and, if the renderings of it released on Thursday are to be believed, decorate it to look like a Gilded Age bordello:

Seriously, look at that crap. It looks like a Chechen warlord threw up.

The White House rolled out the announcement of the building of the ballroom on Thursday with a press release and the usual sycophancy from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during the daily press briefing:

“The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”

Ninety thousand square feet is waaaaay bigger than one needs to seat 650 people, unless each one is getting his or her own table. Maybe Trump plans on letting every team in the NFC East train in the ballroom at the same time.

We've been to the White House, and the grounds are not huge. Where will the president and convicted felon find the space for this monstrosity? The National Mall? The Capitol? Toronto?

“The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942.”

This is the White House’s way of telling us they are going to demolish the East Wing, which is where the First Lady has her offices. But since Melania is acting as First Lady for all of about three hours a week, we guess she doesn’t need the space.

Ninety. Thousand. Square. Feet. A football field is only 57,600 square feet. The square footage of the ground, state, and residence floors of the White House combined are only 55,000 square feet. (This does not include the West Wing or the apparently-soon-to-be-demolished East Wing, but those are not huge.) The Taj Mahal is less than half the size of this ballroom (approximately 35,100 square feet), and way less garish.

What’s the price tag on this monument to the Palace of Versailles, if the Palace of Versailles had been built by a coked-out Middle East potentate?

“President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure.”

Here is the White House trying to get out ahead of the deserved criticism that apparently America cannot afford stuff like Medicaid, SNAP, disease research, environmental research, scientific research, peanut butter paste for famine-ravaged countries in Africa and other foreign aid, housing, space exploration, clean energy, Americorps, teachers, new schools, robustly funded world-class universities, emergency aid for any part of the country that gets wrecked by a natural disaster, weather data, hurricane monitoring satellites, enforcement of laws against ripping off consumers and poisoning the environment, and NATO.

But America can afford to blow $200 million on a giant room that might get used a few times a year, and for which the visual design is what you might get if you wrote a prompt for an AI along the lines of draw a gold ballroom that looks like Elton John exploded.

Claiming the ballroom will be funded by private donors also gets out ahead of the tiny detail that Congress has not appropriated $200 million to be put towards a ballroom as it would be legally required to do. Which someone will probably use as grounds for a lawsuit to stop the thing from being built. And it’s unnecessary, because this Congress would probably fork over $200 million to Daddy Trump for a ballroom without blinking. But Trump always has to make things harder.

Boy, between the ballroom and the $1 billion the taxpayers are spending to upgrade the giant donated Air Force One that Trump gets to take with him when he leaves office, there is a strong “let them eat cake” vibe emanating from this administration like decaying atoms radiating from Chernobyl.

The White House is over 200 years old, and there is nothing wrong with finding ways to update it. Truman oversaw significant renovations designed to keep the old place from falling down. Nixon put in that bowling alley. Gerald Ford put in a pool. Obama put in a basketball court. Jimmy Carter put in the solar panels that Ronald Reagan later ripped out because he was an asshole. Shoot, the soon-to-be-demolished East Wing wasn’t built until 1902, during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.

Trump has already made some changes. He paved over the Rose Garden so it will look more like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He cut down a tree planted by Andrew Jackson, supposedly for safety reasons, and put in two giant 88-foot flagpoles — oh, no reason — on the North and South Lawns.

But a president has never put his stamp on the White House by building an addition such as this: a big, tacky, unnecessary add-on that will dwarf the rest of the building and contain enough gold to blind Marine One pilots when they are trying to land on the lawn.

The decision to build the ballroom should not be up to Trump. We know he does not care, but technically the White House belongs to the American people. He and his descendants will not be living in it forever.

The White House is not a palace. If anything, it should be the opposite of a palace, in keeping with America’s historic belief in itself as a place that is governed by the people and not a king. Or at least we used to think of ourselves that way, before Flushing’s own Louis XVI scammed his way into office.

[White House website / NPR]

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