The cost of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom has skyrocketed to $300 million as the president moves to bulldoze more of the historic site than initially suggested.
But as anger grows over the East Wing being demolished to make way for the project, Trump doubled down on Wednesday, declaring it would be “the finest ballroom ever built” and vowing that it would remain privately funded.
“It’ll be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world. It’s about $300 million. It’s set to do many, many things, including meetings of foreign leaders,” the president said, showing reporters images of what the ballroom interior would look like.
“I think there’ll be nothing like it,” he added.
The president’s new price tag essentially means that the cost of the ballroom has tripled since February, when he first declared during a signing ceremony that he’d like to build it for $100 million.
When Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced formal plans for the ballroom at a briefing in late July, it was priced at $200 million. This subsequently increased to $250 million. Now, just hours after bulldozers first arrived, it’s $300 million.
But as cranes and jackhammers began gutting the historic East Wing this week, destroying the space that has housed generations of First Ladies and greeted millions of visitors and tourists each year for more than a century, anger erupted as it became clear that the project would remove much more than first suggested.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit created by Congress to help preserve irreplaceable historic buildings and monuments, sent a letter to the three agencies overseeing the project on Tuesday and urged them to pause the demolition until the plans go through “legally required public review processes.”
“Doing so will help ensure that the project both honors the exceptional historic significance of the White House and acknowledges the investment that the American people have in the preservation of this beloved place,” the trust’s CEO Carol Quillen wrote to the National Capital Planning Commission.
However, as revealed by the Daily Beast, the National Capital Planning Commission was quietly stacked with Trump loyalists days before the ballroom plans were unveiled in July.
William Scharf, a former personal lawyer to Trump who now serves as the White House staff secretary, was appointed as the commission’s chair, and can now help ensure construction of the ballroom goes according to the president’s plans.
Asked by a reporter how he responded to concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding the project, Trump fired back.
“I’ve shown this to everybody that would listen,” he said, holding up his renderings of the ballroom. “Third-rate reporters didn’t see it because they didn’t look.”
Speaking in the Oval Office alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump also sought to justify the fact that major parts of the East Wing were being destroyed by saying that it had already undergone numerous changes over the years.
“It was not much left from the original,” he said.
“We are using little sections of footings and various other things, but that’s sort of irrelevant. In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure.”
These comments were in contrast to what the president said in July, when he claimed the construction of his $250 million ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building.”
Now, the White House admits, the “entirety” of the East Wing will be “modernized and rebuilt.”
The idea of a White House ballroom has been a long-held dream for Trump, who first suggested it when he was a real estate developer to then-Obama adviser David Axelrod in 2010.
Fifteen years later, it is the latest example of how the president is remaking the White House in his own image.
But while the president insisted again on Wednesday that the ballroom would be “paid for 100 percent by me and some friends of mine,” he also suggested earlier this week that a $230 million payment he is reportedly eyeing as compensation for his past legal battles could be used to help finance the project.
This would effectively mean taxpayers are footing the bill.
The comments were made amid reports that the president was demanding his own Justice Department compensate him for the federal investigations he faced when Joe Biden was in power.
“They probably owe me a lot of money, but if I get money from our country, I’ll probably do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House while we restore the White House,” he said.
The post Trump’s White House Ballroom Budget Balloons After Bulldozers Move In appeared first on The Daily Beast.
