President Donald Trump has offered a fresh defense of his divisive White House ballroom, insisting it is necessary “for the safety of the president,” and that the project is really about delivering security upgrades, not a luxury events space.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Trump was asked by a member of the press corps why taxpayers should now be ”on the hook” for a total of $1 billion, as proposed by Republicans in a new Homeland Security spending bill, after he had originally said the expense would be $400 million and paid for by wealthy private donors.
“Well, they’re not,” the president answered, saying of the $1 billion figure: “That’s for many other projects having to do with safety in a certain section of the White House grounds. That’s not all for the ballroom.
“We’re putting up $400 million to do the ballroom section of the ballroom. We are putting that up privately. I am doing it along with other patriots that love our country.”
He continued: “But they want to do certain things militarily with respect to the ballroom. Having nothing to do with us. Or having to do with the safety of the president. So having to do with a lot of things.
“We are going to have a safe ballroom. It’s under construction, it’s ahead of schedule, it’s right on budget. It would be $300-400 million that we’re putting up. And a lot of that money will be going to safety also.”
The reporter followed up by asking whether Trump would support the publication of a breakdown of precisely how much each of his donors is contributing.
He said he would have “no problem with it” and again praised his backers before taking a swipe at opponents of his pet project.
“You know it’s the only place in the world you can give a $400 million ballroom, you put up the money, and they’re unhappy with it.
“This will be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world and it’ll be the safest ballroom, by far, anywhere in the world and you won’t have a fiasco like you did Saturday night two weeks ago,” he concluded, referring to the aborted White House Correspondent’s Dinner, which had to be evacuated after a suspected gunman attempted to storm the Washington Hilton media gala.
The president continues to enthuse about his “East Wing Modernization Project” and spent Monday night bombarding his Truth Social followers with posts about it, including posting eight pages of screenshots of comments from senators, representatives, and MAGA influencers calling for its completion.
Overground building work on the project has been halted since U.S. District Judge Richard Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in a lawsuit last month seeking to block it, the justice ruling that construction could not continue without congressional authorization.
The trust has come under pressure from the Department of Justice to drop its suit following the attempted attack on the Correspondent’s Dinner but has so far refused to budge.
However, the president’s enthusiasm is not shared by the American public, with a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finding that just 28 percent of people support it.
Fifty-six percent of respondents to the survey said they opposed the development and another 16 percent were unsure, those numbers not changing since the question was last posed in October.
It was reported earlier this week that toxic debris from the construction work has been dumped at a public golf course, with a study by the National Park Service detecting lead, pesticides, chromium, PCBs, and petroleum byproducts in soil left at the East Potomac Golf Links between October and April.
Trump, although a keen golfer himself, is unlikely to be deterred – he is said to be so enamored of the project that he likes to unwind of an evening by listening to updates about its progress from an on-site construction manager.
