President Donald Trump has made little secret that his planned White House ballroom is a top priority, invoking the project more frequently than most other issues. And in recent weeks he has raged at anyone — including a federal judge, a Senate official and a local historian — whose actions threaten to slow construction.
On Monday, the president shared on social media a copy of a legal filing that closely resembled his own words and contended that the weekend’s shooting outside the White House campus proved the need for a ballroom.
“Without the construction of this great Project, the President cannot safely conduct the business of the United States,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche and two other senior Justice Department officials lawyers wrote, urging a federal judge to dissolve his order that could soon halt construction. “This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!”
The filing also mocked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued to halt the project, claiming that the group had been “defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them.” Trump posted all six pages of the filing on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s ballroom project has embodied executive power and its limitations.
The president was able to rapidly bulldoze the East Wing last year, clearing space for his planned 90,000-square-foot addition. Trump has remade independent federal commissions — firing holdovers and installing loyalists, including his executive assistant — that have swiftly approved his project. He’s raised vast sums of money that he says can be put toward the ballroom’s estimated $400 million cost.
But so far, he has been constrained — barely — by the courts and Congress.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has twice sided with the National Trust, ordering a pause on the aboveground components of the ballroom until Congress formally authorizes the project. Leon also criticized the administration’s plan to use private donations to pay for the project, calling it a “Rube Goldberg” contraption that was structured in an attempt to evade congressional oversight. A federal appeals panel stayed Leon’s order and is set to hear arguments in the case June 5.
And Congress has so far not voted to authorize the projects. Last week, Senate Republicans revolted against a proposal to add money to a budget bill to cover security costs related to the ballroom.
Experts in constitutional law and government oversight see a pattern in Trump’s behavior.
“Simply put, as President Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said, he believes he can do literally anything,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, wrote in an email. “And he attacks anyone who tries to stop him.”
The ballroom case has given Trump several new targets.
Leon’s ruling ordering a halt to construction of the ballroom has prompted the president to repeatedly rage online about the “out of control Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge” — an unusual label for a jurist with decades of conservative bona fides, including working to confirm Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“I have a lot of unfriendly judges,” Trump said in remarks at an Easter lunch, after riffing on Leon’s ruling. “Somehow we seem to get by, but they’re not good people.”
Asked whether Trump has dictated Blanche’s filings in the legal case, which so closely resemble his own rhetoric, the White House and the Justice Department have not denied it.
“President Trump is intimately involved in the ongoing disgraceful lawsuit brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and is working diligently with his team of lawyers to bring this charade to an end,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement last month.
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough this month also ruled that hundreds of millions of dollars in ballroom-related security funding could not be included in an immigration enforcement funding package. MacDonough, the Senate’s nonpartisan adviser on procedural questions, determined that Republicans’ plan for including $1 billion in Secret Service priorities in the immigration bill did not comply with the chamber’s rules as written.
Trump, who had previously praised the parliamentarian, responded by calling for her firing.
“Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats — So why has she not been replaced?” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week, referring to the Democratic Party. “Get smart and tough Republicans, or you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!”
GOP leaders have avoided outright criticism of Trump’s ballroom project. But some Republican senators said there were not sufficient votes to support Trump’s ballroom plans, regardless of MacDonough’s ruling.
Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly deprecated Alison Hoagland, the historic preservationist who helped the National Trust bring its lawsuit against the ballroom, as “a woman walking her dog,” saying that she had no standing in the case. The Justice Department’s Sunday night filing also criticized her as a “known serial plaintiff throughout Washington, D.C.”
Hoagland — who is not the plaintiff in the ballroom case — said in an interview that she was mystified to be described as a “serial plaintiff,” saying that she had not personally sued over any matters in Washington. She said she had become involved in the National Trust’s cases only to help the organization bring its lawsuits around the ballroom and Kennedy Center projects.
She acknowledged that she has appeared at recent public hearings on whether to build Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch and to repaint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“I show up at these hearings and testify, because I think someone should say no,” said Hoagland, adding that she had been heartened by the outpouring of emails, messages and other comments from people across the nation.
“This abstract idea that they’re really affected by what goes on in Washington physically, I mean, in the built environment … I find that incredibly moving,” she said.
Few projects have been as close to the president as the ballroom. Trump and his aides amped up their calls after last month’s shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner and last weekend’s shooting outside of the White House, citing the incidents as evidence that his ballroom is needed for a president to hold secure events.
But the public is largely against the project: Fifty-six percent of Americans opposed 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 supported the project, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll last month.
Trump has also been keenly focused on other Washington construction projects, including building the arch, renovating the Kennedy Center and resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, trumpeting his experience as a builder and insistence that he can do the work quickly and at low cost. Those initiatives have prompted lawsuits and complaints from Democrats in Congress that Trump is skirting federal laws in his bid to quickly remake Washington. Like the ballroom, several of the other projects have grown significantly in price since Trump first announced them.
Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization focused on strengthening government, said in an interview Monday that Trump acts as if he sees no distinction between his role as a private citizen and as the nation’s chief executive.
“It’s such a misunderstanding of his responsibility to the public and the nature of our constitutional system,” Stier said, adding that Trump feels empowered to pursue his personal priorities. “He’s surrounded himself with people who are willing to enable that, and those that aren’t, he fires.”
Republican leaders in both congressional chambers have hesitated to publicly oppose Trump’s construction projects, despite Democrats’ growing frustration with the initiatives and insistence that Congress must sign off. Even limited efforts to rein in Trump’s projects have sputtered so far.
As lawmakers debated a military and veterans’ funding package last month, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) attempted to include an amendment that would have commissioned a study on the arch’s potential impact on veterans, family members and other visitors at nearby Arlington National Cemetery. She noted that some veterans have sued over the planned construction, warning that the towering arch would obstruct key views from the cemetery.
“There has been no congressional authorization of this. I know that’s become kind of passé with all the building changes that are going on, but I think it’s a really important thing to consider‚” Pingree said at the legislative markup. “We are the Appropriations Committee, and usually we like to know how our money is going to be spent and what items like this will cost.”
Pingree’s amendment was defeated along party lines; no Republicans supported the measure.
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