Put aside your take on his politics and the fact that he sent asylum-seekers to a foreign prison where they were reportedly tortured and raped: Given what we know about President Donald J. Trump, does he seem like the sort of man who would spend millions of dollars in his own money for the benefit of someone who is not himself?
That was the premise of a White House announcement last week claiming that the president “and other patriot donors” would be financing the full, approximately $200 million cost of a gaudy, gold-tinged pseudo-classical addition to his current residence in Washington, DC. With renderings that look an awful lot like a wing at Mar-a-Lago, the so-called White House Ballroom would be a 90,000-square-foot party venue located where the “small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits,” suggesting that historical preservation is not top of mind.
“The project will begin in September 2025 and it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term,” the White House said, a seeming attempt to assuage concern that the addition signals any intent by one, 79-year-old man to use the space for years to come — after Jan. 20, 2029 — while in the process reaffirming who this addition is actually for.
Selected to design the addition was McCrery Architects, led by a Catholic University professor known for his “stylish bow-ties,” James McCrery, who, in a statement, praised Trump for trusting him to “help bring this beautiful and necessary renovation to The People’s House.” McCrery, who in the past donated to a right-wing super PAC, would indeed appear to have the same design sensibilities as the billionaire who selected him, with the people’s event space set to have “a neoclassical interior with coffered ceiling, Corinthian-style columns, and gold detailing throughout,” per a write-up from ArchDaily.
Like the jumbo-jet from Qatar, then, this addition is for Donald Trump. Indeed, that “unconditional gift” from a Gulf State dictatorship is a clue, perhaps, as to how all this plays out. As The New York Times reported last month, that free Boeing 747 requires a costly, lengthy and classified overhaul if it is ever to be used as Air Force One — which may explain a $934 million transfer from the Pentagon’s top-secret “black budget.”
Once said to be “free,” this donation will turn out to cost almost a billion dollars in taxpayer money. And it would be a remarkable feat were this work on the public dime to be completed fast enough for it to be used for long as a mobile, airborne White House; experts told NPR “it would take years” to bring up to spec of an Air Force One. And whenever it is completed, this publicly funded work will ultimately become the private, personal property of Donald Trump via his presently nonexistent presidential library.
Let’s revisit that White House expansion, then: Could a massive new addition to the president’s Washington home — one that, like his new plane, is required to meet standards far higher than typical private construction — be completely designed and constructed in the next 3.5 years?
No, not really.
“You don’t see one of those projects go that fast,” Jonathan Jarvis, former head of the National Park Service, told the Times. That’s because, as much as it looks like an addition to a Trump-branded property, it is not. “It’s the White House — it has to survive a terrorist attack,” he said.
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That leaves us with a couple of ugly possibilities. Possibly the least-bad: That the job is rushed, historical preservation disregarded and the American people get to see Donald Trump throw parties for a few months — after another taxpayer-funded “black budget” is drained to cover the security and the inevitable cost overruns incurred by tariff-enhanced construction costs.
Again, though: Given what we know about the man, is the current president the sort of guy who would simply want to bequeath a gold-trimmed event space to his successor — to “spend my money for the country,” as he asserted from the roof of the White House briefing room on Tuesday? Provided that elections are free and fair, that could well be a Democrat. That raises a darker possibility: That, like that Qatari jet, this project is intended for the benefit of only one man, and not as a self-funded gift to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzer or even JD Vance.
In 2020, Trump called for canceling an election he was on track to lose, and when he didn’t win he tried to remain in power, urging a mob of his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. Now, flexing every authoritarian muscle and with no one around him to say “no, I don’t think so,” his Department of Justice is indicting opposition politicians on bogus charges; demanding states from California to New York hand over their voters rolls with a stated aim of purging them for “election integrity”; deploying soldiers on the streets of American cities; and trying to strip newborn babies of citizenship guaranteed by a Constitution that he once called for terminating so he could be illegally installed in power.
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“I’d like to run,” Trump told CNBC on Tuesday when asked about campaigning for a third term in 2028, saying only that he would “probably not” attempt something explicitly prohibited by the 22nd Amendment; at the same time, he has never said he “won’t,” while his own website is already hawking the campaign merch.
The effort to turn the White House into another Trump property, in appearance if not yet deed, is but another signal from an unsubtle autocrat of what he intends to do in the years to come. Whether he can, even in a democracy as degraded as the one that allowed him to return to power, is one thing, but another is for certain: this is one man who is not likely to easily hand back the powers and event spaces of the American presidency.
