President Donald Trump brushed off concerns about his White House ballroom’s growing size with an apples-to-oranges comparison and a caustic note to the architect, according to a new report.
The Washington Post obtained dozens of undated handwritten notes that appeared to come from Trump to architect James McCrery II while the two worked on early White House ballroom designs in 2025.
One document places a planned data center superimposed over Manhattan to show how enormous it is, with a note at the top reading: “James, And you think we are big.”
The Post described the note as an apparent reference to McCrery’s concerns about the ballroom’s size as tension between the two flared through the summer of 2025 over Trump’s insistence on expanding the event space until it was nearly twice the size of the historic mansion, with room for more than 1,300 guests.
According to two people familiar with the discussions, McCrery repeatedly warned the White House that Trump’s preferred design did not give guests enough emergency exit routes and would do little to keep a kitchen fire from spreading into the event space above.
Trump brushed off the concerns and said building codes don’t apply to White House construction, those people said.
“I am the code,” Trump said, according to the Post’s sources.
Other markings, made in what appeared to be Trump’s trademark black Sharpie, enlarged McCrery’s sketch of a 640-seat ballroom, scratched out service corridors and crossed out two sets of service stairs, and the notes also covered details as small as which way doors should swing.
Trump’s preferred design also did not include enough toilets to accommodate the ballroom’s maximum occupancy – with just seven stalls in the women’s restroom in one early draft – and his Sharpie markings instead expanded the event space to occupy most of the building’s footprint and emphasized preferences like Corinthian-style columns over simpler columns.
The documents were later stored at the White House in a box labeled “Docs bearing POTUS’s mark.”
Trump spent hours at a time discussing the project with McCrery and called the architect’s cellphone at all hours, the Post reported. McCrery resigned the week of Oct. 20, 2025, the same week demolition of the East Wing began.
A White House spokesman said it would be “factually false and totally inaccurate” to tie McCrery’s exit to code issues. He added that “life safety issues have been addressed and resolved continuously as the design has evolved.”
McCrery offered no reason for leaving. “Having completed the earliest designs, I stepped aside and a new firm was engaged,” he said in a statement.
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