That ugly ballroom epitomises the story of Donald Trump’s presidency
It illustrates his key means, methods, and goals, and reveals the true nature of his achievements
With so many lives at risk in the Middle East in recent weeks, it seemed frivolous if not immoral to care whether the White House got a new ballroom.
It just did not seem to matter much, then, now or ever.
And yet the president of the United States, who would seem to have more reason than most to obsess over the war, insisted even as bombs were falling that the ballroom was “very important”.
And so maybe attention should be paid.
But why?
Well, Donald Trump likes to emphasise that “a lot of people are talking about” how beautiful the White House addition will be.
Tastes vary, though; more people are talking about how fussy and steroidal the design is.
Mr Trump and his aides also keep saying that presidents for 150 years wanted a giant ballroom.
That deepens the mystery: what makes it a priority now?
Presumably, if those presidents wanted a ballroom yet chose not to build it, they must have wanted even more to devote their attention to other matters.
And the present era, like previous ones, offers challenges besides holding big parties.
Then on March 31st a federal judge, Richard Leon, ruled that in demolishing the old East Wing and starting to build his addition, which at 90,000 square feet is nearly double the size of the White House mansion, Mr Trump usurped Congress’s authority.
Judge Leon, a conservative, peppered his irate opinion with exclamation marks, responding to some of Mr Trump’s claims with an eye-rolling “Please!”
Still, all Mr Trump needed to do, Judge Leon wrote, was to get Congress’s authorisation.
Pending that, he blocked construction except as needed for security.
Mr Trump’s lawyers responded on April 3rd with exclamation points of their own, in an appeal declaring the president to be within his rights.
With Trumpian redundancy they thrice called the ballroom “desperately needed”, and they declared it beautiful.
But they also insisted it “serves mission-critical national security goals”.
The roof, for example, is meant to be proof against drones.
Regardless of who prevails in court, the legal papers help illuminate why the ballroom matters: because it is the most complete model to date of Mr Trump’s ambition, methods and means.
It is, in short, the Trumpiest thing he has attempted.
However vast the ballroom proves to be, it will not provide jobs or health care, or even state-dinner invitations, to the left-behind, anti-elitist, anti-swamp voters Mr Trump relies upon.
And yet, though most Americans oppose the project, MAGA adherents overwhelmingly support it, revealing the direction in which MAGA loyalty truly runs.
These Republicans are devoted to serving Mr Trump in his great goal, also exemplified by the ballroom: to make his enduring mark.
“I’m fighting wars and other things,” he acknowledged recently, but he wanted to talk to reporters about the ballroom instead “because this is going to be with us for a long time”.
It is—again—just a ballroom.
And yet it also reveals Mr Trump’s contempt for the Framers’ foundational preoccupation with checking executive power.
Just as he claimed he could impose tariffs on any country for any reason, also to protect national security, he has asserted awesome power over federal property.
His theory is so sweeping, Judge Leon wrote, that it would license him to tear down the White House and replace it with a skyscraper.
“No statute comes close to giving the president the authority he claims to have,” the judge wrote.
Congress, he pointed out, has historically exercised such close oversight of the White House that it prescribes the number of staff and their pay.
This points to another dimension, and weakness, of the Trump method.
Before renovating the White House in 1949, Harry Truman recommended, and Congress created, a commission to oversee the work, with members drawn from the executive and legislative branches.
Mr Trump sought approval for his plan from two commissions, but only after Judge Leon ordered him to in a previous ruling—and only after Mr Trump stacked them with allies.
As critics have noted, his design included stairs that led nowhere and columns so densely packed they would block the view and admit little light.
No doubt construction projects can get mired in bureaucracy.
But as Mr Trump has discovered in Iran, there is danger in substituting affirmation from lackeys for intelligent scrutiny.
Master blaster
And the ballroom is proving a very temple of bootlicking.
To any doubts, Mr Trump’s aides respond by extolling him as a “master builder” or the best developer “in the entire world”.
His lawyers declare the project to be under budget, though the price tag has already quadrupled from the $100m the president initially declared.
They make a virtue of what in previous presidencies would be a vice, that Mr Trump has raised the money from private sources through another signature move—soliciting donors eager for presidential favour, some of whom may never be named.
Mr Trump’s allies insist the project will not cost taxpayers anything.
That claim values the time of the president and his aides, along with all future maintenance of the colossus, at nothing.
(One might conclude Mr Trump believes in asking for forgiveness rather than permission, if he believed in asking for forgiveness.)
They are trying the same move now, lamenting the “large hole beside the Executive Residence”.
Here is revealed Mr Trump’s essence, that of a freewheeling pragmatist untethered by any principled attachment to the rule of law.
And this is why the hole itself, rather than Trump’s Folly if it is built in the end, would be the most apt monument to this presidency.
It has proved far more successful at demolishing venerable if neglected structures than at building anything new, and remotely as beautiful.
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