Americans reject President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, and they appear largely unmoved by the intensified calls from the president and his allies in Congress to allow the project to go forward.
Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose Trump’s decision to tear down the White House’s East Wing to make way for his planned ballroom, funded by about $400 million in private donations, while 28 percent support the project. That is the same division found in an October poll. Reactions are split among partisan lines; about two-thirds of Republicans support the project, while 61 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats oppose it.
There is also a notable enthusiasm gap: Nearly three times as many people “strongly” oppose the project as strongly support it, the poll found.
The poll was conducted Friday through Tuesday, overlapping Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump and his allies have cited the incident as evidence that his ballroom is needed for a president to hold secure events, and a bevy of GOP lawmakers this week introduced legislation to authorize the project or use taxpayer funding to pay for it.
Republican support for the ballroom grew after Saturday’s incident — from 62 percent to 72 percent, the poll found — but overall there was not a clear shift in support for the project. Before the dinner, support stood at 27 percent. It moved to 31 percent afterward, but respondents who completed the survey after the attack were more likely to be Republicans and Trump voters. A statistical analysis accounting for that shift in the sample’s political and demographic makeup found no significant change in opinion associated with the shooting.
Several survey participants elaborated on their views in follow-up interviews with The Post.
“The ballroom is frivolous, in my opinion,” said Tamara Snyder, a Florida woman who identifies as politically independent but leans toward the Republican Party.
She praised the historic preservationists who have sued to stop construction. “I’m 100 percent backing them and what they’re doing,” she said.
Other surveys have produced similar findings. A YouGov poll conducted Monday found that 53 percent of Americans opposed Trump’s ballroom project while 29 percent supported it.
The ballroom has been a second-term fixation for Trump, with the president invoking it more frequently than some of the policy priorities advisers have urged him to highlight ahead of this year’s midterm elections, such as his new TrumpRx drug-pricing website. Administration officials have acknowledged that he has micromanaged the project.
“I’ve been with contractors, because we’re trying to get the ballroom built ahead of schedule,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
The project has become entangled by a legal challenge that threatens to slow construction, frustrating Trump and prompting multiple diatribes on social media.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has ordered a halt to aboveground construction on the ballroom unless Congress authorizes the project, saying that work related to national security can continue. An appeals court panel has stayed that order while it considers the case. Justice Department officials on Monday asked Leon to dissolve his order blocking construction, citing the shooting at the correspondents’ dinner in a rambling legal filing that read like one of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
GOP lawmakers say their legislative proposals will solve the legal problems facing Trump’s project and argue there is urgency after Saturday’s incident.
“The latest assassination attempt should have us all step back and say, what can we do to protect the president,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said on Fox News on Wednesday, after introducing legislation to authorize the ballroom project. “I think we should let it go forward with private funding.”
Despite the efforts to draw a connection, there would be many reasons that the correspondents’ dinner would not be held at the White House ballroom even if it is built. The dinner is a private event, not a government function; it is sponsored by a journalists’ group that emphasizes its independence from the White House; and although opponents have criticized Trump’s ballroom for being too large, it would be too small to hold the more than 2,500 people who attend the annual press gala unless the event is shrunk.
Trump has also pursued other building projects, including a planned 250-foot triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. He has sought to put his name on government buildings and visible symbols, including a plan for the U.S. Treasury to print Trump’s signature on paper money instead of the treasury secretary’s.
The public rejects those ideas, too, the Post-ABC-Ipsos poll finds. Fifty-two percent of Americans are against the planned arch, compared with 21 percent who favor it. A slight majority of Republicans (51 percent) support the project, while most independents (57 percent) and Democrats (78 percent) oppose it. A federal panel, packed with Trump allies, earlier this month gave preliminary approval to the project’s design.
The idea of Trump’s signature on paper money is even less popular, with 68 percent of Americans opposed to the Treasury plan, while 12 percent support it. The plan provokes a negative reaction from Republicans, with 28 percent in favor and 40 percent opposed.
In interviews, survey respondents drew connections between Trump’s efforts to build a ballroom and an arch and his ambition to put his signature on currency.
“I think it’s a vanity thing,” said a respondent named Jay, an independent voter in Montana who declined to give his last name out of fear of professional reprisal.
Democrats have lambasted Trump’s plans as self-centered and overly focused on his own legacy.
“It’s astonishing what’s going on,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee), who has criticized the ballroom and arch projects, as well as Trump’s efforts to brand his name across the government. “He has no respect for anybody, any memory, any history. It’s all about him.”
Read detailed results of the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. The poll was conducted online April 24-28 among 2,560 U.S. adults nationwide reached through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel of U.S. households recruited by mail using random sampling methods. Results for questions in this article are based on a random half-sample of 1,292 U.S. adults, with a 2.8 percentage-point margin of sampling error. The sample was weighted to match population demographics, 2024 turnout/vote choice and political partisanship.
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