President Donald Trump gave a last-minute speech touting the marble floor and “missile-proof” ceiling of his White House ballroom a day after Democrats seized control of Congress.
Trump had no public events on his schedule Wednesday, but he summoned reporters on short notice, the Associated Press reported. He spoke from the ballroom’s construction site, where he presided over the placement of its last beam.
The sudden summons and the subject caught White House reporters by surprise.
“White House pool unexpectedly called to gather… we may hear from Trump after all,” Danny Kemp, a White House correspondent for Agence France-Presse, wrote on X.
“Surreal moment happening NOW at the White House,” Reuters reporter Gram Slattery wrote on X. “Trump, after hours and hours of radio silence, called in the pool out of nowhere to discuss the ballroom, the golf course and other Washington beautification projects.”
“Trump, holding a mic that keeps having reverb and in deeply subdued form, goes through the various room layouts, floor structures, and beams of the coming White House ballroom,” Sam Stein, managing editor of The Bulwark, wrote on X. “The crowd, dead silent, looks on as a little wind breezes through his hair.”
Trump praised the ballroom’s strength and its materials.
“It is drone-proof, missile-proof, bulletproof,” Trump said of the ballroom’s ceiling. “The side walls and glass is bulletproof and drone-proof. No drone can pierce it, no bullet can pierce it, no matter how big.”
“The marble floor you will see is the most beautiful marble you will see,” he said, adding that it came from “a vein that everybody wanted for a long time.”
The remarks came hours after Democrats flipped at least seven Republican-held Senate seats, including in Kansas, Texas and Ohio, and won the House.
Reporters and commentators on both the left and the right contrasted Trump’s focus on the ballroom with his party’s losses.
“Trump talking about his ‘top-of-the-line’ ballroom one day after a generation of House Republicans lost seats and Democrats won the Senate,” Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman wrote on X.
“Democrats just handed Republicans an electoral a—-kicking, and Trump is outside discussing interior decorating,” progressive commentator Alex Cole observed. “You cannot make this s— up.”
“[E]ven after last night’s blue tsunami, Trump is holding an event right now to rant like a lunatic about his self-indulgent ballroom that nobody else wants,” independent journalist Aaron Rupar wrote. “Dude is incapable of learning lessons.”
“A rather tone deaf thing to do, but he does not care and never did, and voters took it out on his whole party last night because of it,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson complained as the event was underway.
“You saw the people that were packed, thousands and thousands of people at every rally,” Trump said of the election. “And if I was on the ballot, we would have won. But they just — you couldn’t transfer that love.”
Democrats’ new House majority is the outcome Trump warned in January would lead to his impeachment.
“[I]f we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told House Republicans at a Jan. 6 retreat, NBC News reported. “I’ll get impeached.”
“Not even a little bit,” Trump said Wednesday when a reporter asked whether he was concerned about impeachment.
By Trump’s own account, the Iran war that he agreed largely explains his party’s losses will end when he decides. He admitted it was “largely true” that the war caused his party’s losses but agreed with a reporter that the war was “worth it.”
One reporter asked Trump when the war would end.
“Whenever I want it to,” the president replied, adding that it had to be “done right.”
“Congratulations to President Jon Ossoff,” Spencer Hakimian, founder of Tolou Capital Management, wrote on X, after Trump made the remark. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) won reelection Tuesday.
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