Speaking to reporters Sunday night aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump began with an update about hostilities in Iran but soon pivoted to a different priority: his planned $400 million White House ballroom.
For five minutes, the president displayed new renderings, handed to him by Bill Pulte, a top administration housing official, as he again made the case for his controversial addition to the White House grounds.
“I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this … I’m fighting wars and other things,” Trump told reporters. “But this is very important, because this is going to be with us for a long time, and it’s going to be, I think it will be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”
The new renderings revealed some changes to the ballroom’s design, including removal of stairs on its south side that some observers had criticized as extraneous.
Trump also briefly alluded to the military’s role in the project, which the president has said he hopes to complete by next year.
“The military is building a massive complex under the ballroom,” Trump said. White House officials have said the underground portion of the project is a matter of national security but have declined to offer further details. It has long been known, however, that the area underneath the former East Wing of the White House contains secure facilities the president and staff members could use in an emergency.
The ballroom has been a priority for Trump, who rapidly demolished the East Wing last year to make way for it. He has solicited millions of dollars from private companies to pay for the project, and he frequently mentions it in speeches and unscripted remarks.
It has proved less popular with voters, polls have found. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said they opposed tearing down the East Wing to build the ballroom, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted last month, while 25 percent said they supported it.
Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to a federal commission reviewing the project, and a Washington Post analysis found more than 97 percent of those comments were critical of the president’s plans.
The design has been panned by architects and historic preservationists, who say that the 90,000-square-foot addition is too large and will overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House. James McCrery II, Trump’s first architect on the project, clashed with the president over his plans to enlarge the ballroom, then was replaced.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which Congress charged with helping to preserve historic buildings, has sued to stop the project, saying that Trump failed to receive congressional authorization. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon is weighing whether to halt the project.
The New York Times on Sunday wrote about concerns over the ballroom’s design, an article that appeared to irk the president, who mentioned it several times aboard Air Force One.
The White House has said that it plans to start aboveground construction on the ballroom as soon as April. Whether that work begins could be determined by what happens this week. A federal commission now led by Trump’s allies is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to approve the project — the final procedural hurdle for an effort to dramatically remake one of the most revered symbols of American power and democracy.
Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, has signaled his ruling on the National Trust’s lawsuit could come as soon as this week too. The judge has been skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments that the president had the authority to tear down the East Wing to build his planned ballroom. He also has criticized Trump’s reliance on donations from private companies to fund the project, saying it amounted to an “end-run” around congressional oversight. Major corporations including Amazon, Google and Palantir, which have donated to the project, collectively have billions of dollars in contracts before the administration. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Leon has said that he expects his eventual ruling to be appealed, potentially to the Supreme Court.
Aboard Air Force One, Trump only made a glancing acknowledgment of the “stupid lawsuit” threatening his project. The president instead talked in depth about the ballroom’s features as he flipped through six renderings that he said he had commissioned that day.
“A lot of people are giving it really good reviews,” the president said.
The new designs provided more detail on the ballroom, including a close-up image of its columns, which Trump said would be hand-carved.
“They’ll be Corinthian, which is considered the best, most beautiful by far,” Trump said — his latest acknowledgment of his preference for that style of columns.
The renderings also removed a prominent staircase that had led from the ballroom’s south portico onto the White House’s south lawn. Trump had repeatedly shared renderings featuring that staircase, and a federal commission that Trump packed with his allies approved a design last month that included the staircase.
“We took the stairs out that were on the south side and really replaced them with these stairs,” Trump said, referring to what he called a “fire stair” next to the portico. “So you have an open porch and you have the closed porch under the columns overlooking the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial.”
Credits on the renderings said that they were produced by Shalom Baranes Associates, the firm handling the ballroom project.
Asked about the timing of the project, Trump repeated his frequent refrain: “We’re ahead of schedule and under budget.”
Even after moving off the ballroom topic, the president found a way to relate reporters’ questions about Iran — such as whether he planned to send U.S. troops into the country — back to his construction project.
“Just like we’re ahead of schedule on the ballroom, in a much bigger way, we’re ahead of schedule with Iran,” Trump said.
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