Trump said Monday that people who oppose the White House ballroom are disloyal to the country. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he said that the people opposing the ballroom are, in his opinion, very disloyal to the country, and repeated it for emphasis. He then said the project is way ahead of schedule and under budget and will be the most beautiful ballroom of its kind.
He also described the ballroom as a gift, saying it is for future presidents and not for him.The White House ballroom is the 90,000-square-foot event space Trump is building where the East Wing of the White House used to be. The East Wing was demolished last fall. That is the section of the building that housed the first lady’s offices and the entrance most public tours came through. Trump ordered it torn down without telling Congress, and construction started on the replacement.The reason the ballroom keeps ending up in court is a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit that works to protect historic buildings and sites.
The group argued that Trump does not have the legal authority to make such a large change to the White House on his own. In March, a federal judge in Washington named Richard Leon agreed enough to issue a preliminary injunction, which is a court order that pauses something while the case is still being decided. Leon wrote that no statute comes close to giving the president the authority he says he has. He carved out an exception allowing security-related work like underground bunkers to continue.Trump’s response then was that he did not need permission from Congress because no public money was paying for it. He has said he raised hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations, wealthy donors, and himself.
On August 7, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals backed the lower court in a 2 to 1 decision running 136 pages. The panel wrote that whether a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide and is not a matter for executive self-help. Judge Neomi Rao dissented, arguing the National Trust should not have been able to bring the lawsuit at all and that improving the executive residence likely falls within the president’s authority. She also wrote that the lower court put one passerby’s aesthetic displeasure above the government’s security interests.The panel paused its own order for two weeks so the administration could appeal, which means the ruling takes effect August 21.
Trump said he would take it to the Supreme Court, and he did. On Friday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the lawyer who argues the government’s cases before the Supreme Court, filed an emergency request asking the justices to lift the injunction while the appeal plays out. The filing described the project as an integrated military complex that includes a totally secure ballroom space and called it vitally required by national security. Trump has increasingly leaned on that argument, pointing to what he describes as a drone port on the roof. Chief Justice John Roberts set a Tuesday deadline for the National Trust to respond, and Sauer asked the court to rule before August 21. The National Trust said in a statement Friday that the administration’s efforts to evade the rule of law and frustrate judicial review need to stop.
The cost figure has moved a lot. Trump has publicly put the ballroom at $400 million. The Washington Post reported last week that the completed project is now set to run at least $900 million, more than double what he has been saying, which is the same week he stood in the Oval Office and said it is under budget.
The disloyalty line also runs into a paper trail. Before a March hearing, the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal panel that reviews building projects in Washington, received more than 35,000 public comments about the ballroom. A commission spokesman said it was the most public feedback on any project before the panel in recent years. Commission staff said the vast majority of those comments opposed the plan, and a Washington Post review found more than 97 percent were critical. More than 100 people signed up to testify.
Some of that opposition came from his own voters. Jim Cunningham, a Republican who has held local elected office in Media, Pennsylvania, told the Post he voted for Trump three times but did not vote for this, and said Trump is a temporary occupant of a house that belongs to the American people.
The commission itself voted 8 to 1 to approve the ballroom plans, and Trump publicly thanked Senator Rand Paul, one of his more frequent Republican critics, for voting yes. But commission approval is a separate question from the one the courts are deciding, which is whether Congress has to sign off before anything gets built.
Polling has not been kind either. One survey found 28 percent of Americans supported the project.None of that changes what happens next. The Supreme Court has until Friday to decide whether construction restarts or stops cold.
