President Donald Trump has spent months touting his planned White House ballroom, but this week the public gets its first chance to formally offer him their thoughts.
The verdict: They don’t like it.
Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to the National Capital Planning Commission ahead of its Thursday hearing to review the ballroom, according to a Washington Post analysis of comments posted on the commission’s website.
The “vast majority” of comments came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Post found that more than 97 percent of comments were critical of the president’s plans. (The Post used artificial intelligence to classify the submissions and measured its accuracy against a hand-checked sample.)
More than 100 people are also slated to testify at the virtual hearing.
The comments, which are available online, represent a striking departure from how the president and his aides have depicted the ballroom, arguing that the project is popular and necessary. Trump’s handpicked members of the Commission of Fine Arts, which weighs in on major design projects in Washington, unanimously approved the project last month, agreeing with the president’s contention that the planned 1,000-seat ballroom is needed to help entertain VIP guests.
Trump’s appointees to the National Capital Planning Commission, which focuses on urban planning in the region, are also expected to help ensure the project is swiftly approved. The White House has said it plans to begin above-ground construction of the ballroom as soon as next month, following the panels’ reviews.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization charged by Congress with preserving historic buildings, sued in December to block the ballroom project, arguing that Americans had not had an opportunity to comment on Trump’s changes before the president tore down part of a building known as “The People’s House.”
About a quarter of the comments appear to echo criticism first submitted by Anara Guard, a creative writer, which was then amplified in a Facebook post by Sara Paretsky, a mystery writer. Guard’s comment — which includes the line “I oppose the spending of $300 million on this project, which was initiated without the proper authorization, permits, or design review”— appears to have been used around 10,000 times, the Post review found.
Paretsky, the Chicago-based author of the “V. I. Warshawski” series, said in an interview that she has regularly used social media to criticize the president’s policies, including protesting ICE’s presence in her hometown. But nothing has struck a chord online like the idea of the president demolishing the East Wing last year, she said. Her Facebook post was shared about 20,000 times.
“I think people felt as viscerally attacked as if their own homes had been hit by a wrecking ball, because, in a way, it symbolically is our home,” Paretsky said.
Polls have found that most Americans oppose the president’s planned ballroom. Fifty-eight percent of respondents 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.
Stephen Staudigl, a spokesman for the National Capital Planning Commission, wrote in an email that the commission received more than 35,000 public comments on the project, which represents the most feedback on a project before the panel in recent years.
A survey of the comments reveals a range of reasons for Americans’ opposition.
The letter-writers included: architects who questioned whether the White House ballroom team was complying with the profession’s code of conduct, which calls for protecting historic assets; congressional lawmakers who demanded answers about the scale and scope of the president’s project; and longtime Republicans who said they were faithful supporters of Trump but angered by his treatment of a treasured building.
“I voted for Trump three times. But I did not vote for this,” Jim Cunningham, a Republican who has held local elected office in his hometown of Media, Pa., said in an interview Monday. “Trump is only a temporary occupant of the White House. It belongs to the American people. It’s not his personal property.”
A number of former White House staffers also weighed in.
Deborah Sloan, who worked in the East Wing from 1969 to 1972 as assistant to White House Social Secretary Lucy Winchester, challenged Trump’s contention that administrations need a 1,000-seat facility to properly entertain VIP guests.
Sloan, 80, said in an interview she was “intimately involved” in planning state dinners, Christmas parties and first lady Pat Nixon’s “Evenings at the White House,” which featured popular artists like Johnny Cash, Sammy Davis Jr. and Merle Haggard. The State Dining Room, which can seat 140 guests, almost always had enough space to accommodate the guest list, she said, especially since the White House often invited 50 more people to the larger East Room for after-dinner entertainment and dancing.
The relatively small size conveyed the specialness of the event, she said.
“The magic of a state dinner is the intimacy the guests feel when they’re in the presence of the president of the United States, not in having to stand in a receiving line with 500 or 1,000 people,” Sloan told The Post.
Other comments were more prosaic. One letter-writer proposed a new “Eagle Wing” of the White House, including an image of a chrome eagle sculpture that would serve as a centerpiece. Another called for the ruins of the East Wing to remain undisturbed as “a memorial to its history and to the American people.”
Some commenters registered their disapproval visually, such as connecting Trump’s ballroom to his other makeovers of the White House grounds. Another letter-writer argued that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom addition, next to the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, would force the president to adopt new stationery, drawing a mock-up for comparison.
A slender share of the comments cheered for the ballroom. A letter-writer identified as Anne Nieman said she supported the project, citing lessons from her father, a preservation architect in Alabama.
“Our White House has been burned, rebuilt, added to, and modernized over many decades to keep the building functional and secure for our national government and the occupants therein. This is how you save historic structures: by keeping them viable and adapting to modern uses and needs,” Nieman wrote.
Others simply cited their faith in the president.
“I am confident in President Trump’s expert talents in the entire project,” a letter-writer identified as Herman Goetter wrote.
But most commenters said Trump was destroying the historic building, not saving it.
Sloan and Penny Adams, a fellow former East Wing staffer who served the first lady from 1969 to 1973, said they want the commission to reject the project and direct White House planners to create a replica of the East Wing. If commissioners allow a ballroom building, they should insist the Trump administration dramatically shrink the proposed structure so that it doesn’t “dwarf that iconic symbol of America.”
Paretsky and others flatly said they wished future leaders would go further.
If the ballroom is built, “I would like to see it torn down,” Paretsky said. “I don’t see a use for it. It’s something like double the size of the rest of the White House. It will be there like an enormous tumor.”
Methodology
The Post used artificial intelligence to classify more than 35,000 public comments posted on the NCPC website as of 5 p.m. on March 4, 2026. To measure the accuracy of its classification tool, The Post selected a random sample of comments that did not include a phrase from the duplicated comment referenced in this story, and found that the tool had a 100% success rate for critical comments, and an 86% success rate for non-critical comments, meaning that the percentage of critical comments is likely an undercount. (The tool classified around 10,000 comments that used an identical phrase from Anara Guard’s comment as being critical of the project.)
The post Thousands of public comments slam Trump’s ballroom: ‘I did not vote for this’ appeared first on Washington Post.
