Right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas told thousands gathered on the National Mall on Sunday that the Almighty spent two centuries waiting to deliver one Donald Trump so the president could finally build his $400 million ballroom.
“Yes, it’s hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand,” Metaxas said at the taxpayer-backed “Rededicate 250” prayer event. “It’s extraordinary. We only had to wait 200 years.”
The Bonhoeffer biographer-turned-MAGA cheerleader then pivoted, without missing a beat, from divine ballroom prophecy to the War of 1812: “So after they burned the White House, which I may have mentioned, did not at that time have a ballroom, the British turned their attentions to Baltimore and Fort McHenry.”
Metaxas was sanctifying a project that the public, the courts, and even Trump’s own first lady have struggled to embrace.
The East Wing — promised by the White House to remain untouched — was “suddenly and shockingly demolished in October” to make way for the ballroom. The price tag has since doubled, with Trump in December upping it to $400 million, despite his pledge of “no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever.” It’s not playing well at home. More than 2,000 public comments to the National Capital Planning Commission were 99% negative. A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed the project remained unpopular by a 2-to-1 margin. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled Tuesday that construction on President Trump’s White House ballroom “must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”
Trump’s own explanation for the project hardly screams divine commission. “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself – because no one else will,” he reportedly told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
Meanwhile, Republicans are quietly trying to stick taxpayers with the bill anyway. The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee has requested $1 billion in funding that could go to security related to the $400 million ballroom, more than twice the construction cost itself.
Metaxas is no stranger to grafting Trump onto sacred American history. The Yale-educated author, who once compared a Hillary Clinton victory to Germany embracing Hitler, has called Joe Biden a “puppet of the Devil” and recently claimed no violent protesters were at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
His Sunday remarks landed at an event critics already brand a church-state breach. Americans United for Separation of Church and State CEO Rachel Laser called the gathering “less a ‘Jubilee of Prayer’ than a ‘Jubilee of Christian Nationalism.’”
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