Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Ballroom Obsession Has Gone Totally Off the Rails (w/ Ben Terris)

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

Tim Miller sits down with New York Magazine’s Ben Terris to discuss his extraordinary reporting on Donald Trump’s obsession with the new White House ballroom. Ben spent 90 minutes with Trump, toured the ballroom construction site, and got a firsthand look at the massive project, which is already employing hundreds of workers.Trump claims the ballroom is being built with “nuclear concrete” strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast. He also opened up to Ben about why he’s so determined to build it, agreeing that nobody else would build monuments to him after he’s gone.Read more from Ben: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-white-house-ballroom-helipad-reflecting-pool-supreme-court.html

Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller with the Buller. I'm here with my buddy Ben Terrace, who is just killing it at New York Magazine. And he's been mostly on the health beat lately talking about Fetterman's mental health, Trump's bruises, Biden. So we might check in on all of that on the back end. But you have a new piece out today that is focused on Trump's obsession with the ballroom. You are inside. You were in the ballroom. I was, yeah. outside the ballroom. Yeah. And so let's talk about that a little bit. How did that come to pass? First of all, I think it kind of is a health story in a way, too, right? I mean, this is like Donald Trump thinking about mortality and his legacy and trying to build something that will last forever.

You know, if he doesn't last forever, he's trying to build something that will. So this, I feel like is actually a little bit of mental health, like the level of obsession. I would say, yeah. There's some mental health issues at play here as well, perhaps. How did it come to be? I mean, look, the ballroom is something that Donald Trump talks about all the time. I mean, no matter what he's talking about, the ballroom comes up. He can be talking to a collection of foster children and foster parents about trying to fix the foster care system.

And instead of just going right into that, he'll spend five minutes talking about the ballroom that's going to be built nearby. If he is having meetings with cabinet secretaries, he'll ask them their opinions on different floor samples and chandelier options for the ballroom. And so had it come up, when Charlie Kirk got assassinated, he was asked the next day, how is he how he's doing? And he said, basically, I'm doing pretty well. The ballroom over there is moving along. How are you holding up for the last thing to have to? I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the truck, they just started construction at the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. The fact that he brings it up all the time meant that I kind of had to write about it, right?

I cover Washington for New York Magazine, and this is something that's being talked about all the time in Washington. And I wanted to know why. I wanted to know how much time it's really taking out of the president's day. I wanted to know how the staff felt about this. And I wanted to see if the president would talk to me about his feelings about the ballroom, how it's coming together and why he, you know, and he's so into it. And he did. Yeah. I want to go to the, I just want to take the clock back a little bit because there was an anecdote I did not know about in the story that it's kind of a ballroom origin item. And that was when Barack Obama was president. Donald Trump called David Axelrod and said, I want to build you a module or ballroom. The tent that you have is sad. And Axelrod didn't call him back, which I found funny. And then I kept reading and he did an interview. And Axelrod was like, Axelrod seemed to be like saying that he messed up.

He was like, Donald Trump did deserve a callback. And I was like, why? Yeah. Yeah. The way this came together is interesting. And I can give you some backstory that's not even in the art. article. Mika Brzeinski connected Donald Trump and David Axelrod in 2010.

She told Axelrod, look, Donald Trump wants to have a call with you. Can you make it happen? Axelrod made that call happen. And the first call was not about the ballroom. It was 2010, and Donald Trump told Axelrod, you know that oil spill you got in the golf? I'm the guy to fix it. The guy you have down there, he's a nice guy, but he's not getting it done. Send me down.

I'll fix it. I fix big problems. That's what he said to Axelrod. And Axelrod was like, I think we got it under control. Thank you. I mean, this was the Gulf oil spill. It was a huge deal. Trump just wanted it on the action.

Like a week later, maybe, Trump's back in touch with Axelrod. And he's like, yeah, I see you have the Gulf under control. I want to talk to you about something else. I build ballrooms, beautiful ballrooms. You got the shitty tents, like you said. Let me build you a ballroom. And Axelrod was like, this is not really in my department. apartment. Let me put you in touch with the social secretary. He passes on a note to the social

secretary, and they never call Trump back. And Axrot seems mad about that. Yeah, well, he says he feels bad. He says that Trump was offered, deserved a call. I wanted to know if Axelrod felt like, had you just let him build this ballroom, could there have been a photo op with President Obama and Trump? And might Trump have never run for president at all? Because, you know, he ran in part because of the spite. So, you know, the supposed spite he felt for the Obama White House. Axelrod wouldn't really play that game. But he did say that he regrets it because had they let him build this modular ballroom,

maybe the East Wing never would have been torn down. And he finds that to be a real tragedy. And, you know, he wonders about his role in that. Okay. Well, I guess I just, I mean, Axelrod had an important job. My take is talking to Trump twice was one time too many. Yeah, that's fair. And also, Axelrod did say that he found the whole thing.

kind of preposterous, right? Like, they were just coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. And he didn't like this idea of a ballroom being built by Barack Obama when people were struggling to make ends meet. It just was really bad politics. Before we get into, like, your interview with Trump and the ballroom itself and, you know, kind of our, I kind of feel like a neighbor, like trying to look over the fence at the remodel happening next door.

Before we indulge in any of that, we should just at least say, Congress has jurisdiction over this. Yeah. Trump is doing this around that. There's a fundraising effort at the beginning, but then he just decided to appropriate my money, taxpayer money, and Congress has just kind of let that be. Like there's no other Republicans care about that at all.

Trump will say over and over again that no taxpayer dollars are being spent on this ballroom because he did a fundraiser, and that is paying for a lot of the ballroom, itself, but there is a ton of security enhancements in this military bunker that's going underneath that is being paid for by taxpayers. So about half of it is being paid for by taxpayers in that way. Congress does have jurisdiction. We're also kind of paying up front on the back end for like the, you know, the tariff rebates

that the companies that donated are getting, you know? Sure. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of questions about what do people get when they, when they donate to this. I talked to a Republican lobbyist who was like, this was the easiest money I ever had to You know, I just talked to clients and was like, if you give money to this, like Trump will like you and people were willing to throw money at it. But it's illegal. I mean, the fund, the other part of the funding is illegal.

Yeah, I mean, the Supreme Court is allowing him to do it at this moment, but John Robert said that it's likely unlawful. I don't really know how to square that, to be honest. It's a standing thing. I had David French on. He'll explain it to you. Right, right, right. You have to go to Yale law to get it. Yeah, yeah, no, and I definitely did not go to Yale law.

And so, yeah, they're able to keep doing it, but Congress does have jurisdiction over all federal buildings. It's in the Constitution. And Congress has not done anything to allow this to happen. Trump is just kind of doing it. I mean, this is why the story felt important to me, right? Like, you can look at the ballroom and say, why are you writing about the ballroom? There's so many more important things happening. But it's kind of the perfect metaphor in a lot of ways for how Donald Trump's presidency is going in the second term.

He's more unbound than ever. Congress can't stop him. The courts can't stop him. You want to see a physical manifestation of how Trump is in this kind of unbound presidency, and it's the ballroom. I really think it's a perfect representation of how he's doing the job. I agree. I would never ask why you would do that.

I think it's, unfortunately, it's an extremely central item to the second Trump administration. So you talked to him about it as part of the tour, and as you kind of alluded to earlier, there's kind of a psychological element where you're asking him about the Democrats wanting to maybe tear it down and why he was doing it like that, naming, you know, having his legacy. Talk about that a little more. I did ask whether he was worried that Democrats would tear down the ballroom. There has been some talk about this from people who might run for president or pundits or, you know. I asked Pete about it about a month or two ago. Pete said that that he was keeping something, I don't know if a quote in front of me.

It sounds like keeping all, but it wouldn't be his top priority. Sure. He's like, maybe there's some things that you could look into about naming it or altering it. Pete's kind of a middle ground. He wasn't like the take a sledgehammer, you know, day one after the inauguration, I'm going to drive an excavator over there kind of thing. Well, I asked Trump if he was worried that Democrats would tear it down and he basically was like, I'd like to see them try. He said, we're building this out of nuclear concrete. That's what he told me.

Nuclear concrete. you know, it's made to withstand a nuclear blast. He said, it can withstand Democrats. He said, if a Democrat came with a jackhammer and spent two days jackhammering the same spot on a column, nonstop, it wouldn't leave a mark. So he's sort of almost like daring people to try. Seems like a dare. I was going to say, it seems like a dare. Yeah.

I also asked him, you know, there was this kind of great quote from Senator John Ossoff where he said that Donald Trump is building monuments to himself because he knows. that after he's gone, nobody else will do it. And so I asked the president about that directly, kind of expecting him to dodge or, you know, maybe not answer the question because he doesn't always answer questions. Or just make fun of John Ossoff. Yeah, called Pee-Herman.

Exactly. And he didn't do that. Instead, he just looked at me and he said, yeah, he's right. Nobody else would do this. After I'm gone, nobody else would do this. And so if the main question was, why is Donald Trump so obsessed with the ballroom? A big reason is because he does want to build himself

an indestructible legacy that nobody else would do for him, right? If you pass legislation, if you sign executive orders, those can get rolled back by Democratic Congress. Whoever writes history books can write about this moment in time however they want. But if he builds himself a nuclear-grade ballroom that Democrats can't take down, down, he feels like he's building himself an indestructible legacy.

I've got to tell you, I've been kind of wishy-washy on the ballroom destruction, just as a personal matter speaking for myself, you're a reporter. But hearing more and more about this, I'm getting more interested in tearing it down. It's kind of side of a symbolic thing. And Jonathan Martin speaks this. Now I have Trump-Drangers syndrome, so I would say that. But he posted something about your article about how, you know, I worry a little bit that we, you know, end up never being able to escape the Trump

thing. Some people you're like finally he's going to be gone. We can move forward in 2029. And it's like, well, but if the Democrats run on ripping everything down that he ever kind of built and constructed, so you can imagine your head like

a 2031 Republican primary where there's a show of hands question from the AI moderator about, you know, should we rename everything after Donald Trump or not? It does, like there does feel like the ballroom. is this, like you said, like this totem that kind of like represents this kind of decade-long fight.

You know, you're assuming he's going to leave the White House after 2028. And you asked you about that? I did. I did. I asked him if he was building himself a bunker that he could hole up in after 2028 and, you know, continue living in the White House. And he laughed and he said something like, I'll tell you what, it would be awfully hard to get you out. It would be impossible to get you out. And he said he hasn't heard that, though, which was interesting, because that is like something that people say on the, you know, in the, you know, and the. resistance kind of media. And Trump, in the first term, was pretty attuned all people were saying

about him. So it made me wonder. I was like, was he fibbing or is he in a different type of bubble now? He's always been in a bit of a bubble, but now he's surrounded by a staff that's much more yes man. He's got Natalie Hart printing out all the stuff that, you know, he wants to see. He's not necessarily seeing all the commentary that he used to. Okay. Let's do the little rubbernecking part of this now. What was it like in there? How did it have God? how much gold? What did it look like? Well, you know, starting in the Oval Office, it's obviously filled with gold. I asked him how much...

We've seen the video. Yeah, I asked him how much gold was in there, and he just said a lot, and he called it God's favorite metal, which I never heard before. I didn't know that God had a favorite medal, but he does. You know, there's no gold yet in the ballroom because it's still a construction site. The renderings have a lot of gold. I mean, it's, you know, gold accents on the ceiling, gold on the, you know, the columns. There's...

It's everywhere. naturally. What I was most struck by when I went to the ballroom site was how big it is. I mean, the place is going to be twice as big, almost twice as big as the actual White House, the main structure of the White House. And a ton has gone up. I mean, you know, this is all happening kind of behind the White House in a place that you can't see normally. You can see the cranes. If you go up the Washington Monument, you can see it from far away. But to see it up close, It was massive. I mean, 70 feet in the air, scaffolding rising or rebar rising. 250 workers are working on it.

You know, millions of pounds of concrete have been poured. It feels like it's one of those things that's going to be finished relatively quickly at this pace that it's going. I mean, that still means a year plus away, but like it's really, it's flying. I mean, that kind of circles me back to the, kind of that they're just, doing this via, you know, like this just do things debate, you know, and, and it kind of feels like he's winning that part of the debate, unfortunately. You know, I'd never like to hand it to him, but like, when you, when I'm doing these interviews with Democratic 2028ers, I, you know, you could say that, like,

their motives are more pure or whatever, but like there is, like, there is kind of this idea that's just like, okay, rather than letting everything be bogged down and process and reviews, and you can imagine how long this would take to build normally. It's just kind of like, I guess the right thing to do now is to say, fuck it. He feels emboldened. I mean, look, yesterday they announced that they're going to start building the arch in the next couple weeks, and that hasn't been approved either. And so, yeah, he's just decided that, you know, break things, put things up, and don't even ask

for forgiveness later. The Stephen Chung of it all, we should just point out, I guess he was with you on the tour. He's the, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's. He's a striking figure, I guess. You would notice him on the horizon, and he's a communications director for Trump, and you guys are talking, and he's just like interjecting, it seems like, basically the article, kind of like,

North Korea-style tributes to him. Sir, you're restoring glory to the White House. Is that what was happening? Yeah, and he was, when he said, you're restoring glory to the White House, he was talking about the granite stone that was being put down in place of asphalt that was on a path that led to the residents.

I mean, it was like a very minor thing, but spoken in kind of hushed, reverent tones. It was a... I mean, I found it funny in real time, but it wasn't intentionally funny. Yeah. I mean, you cover a lot of politicians. You're doing profiles of staffer.

I used to be the staffer that hung around and tried to keep the politician out of trouble. That's unusual. Yeah, I mean, it's unusual, but also the president brings him into it. You know, the president, he's this guy who, like, if someone's around, he's going to talk to that person. You know, I went in there.

I thought I was going to have 15, 20 minutes in the Oval Office. That's what they told me it was going to be. And I was there for like an hour and a half. And it was because he just kept it. Honestly, I feel like this was like his favorite day of being president. Because normally people come in and want to talk to him about Iran or they want to talk about tariffs or they want to talk about whatever. And he keeps wanting to bring up the ballroom.

And people have to keep getting off that topic to talk about what they want to talk about. I was in there to talk about his favorite subject. And so I feel like he could have talked to me all day. I mean, you know, and it doesn't seem like that's really locked in on, you know, the problems facing the American people. Unless you think the biggest problem facing the American people is the lack of a big ballroom in the White House, that's true. But if you think the lack of a big ballroom is the biggest problem, he is incredibly locked in. Incredibly locked in. Okay.

Let's talk about the health. I think the last time I had you on the channel, we were talking about the scuttle butt about the bruises and the hand. and you'd been in the Oval Office and been able to see it, but, I mean, 90 minutes, one-on-one time, you really got up close. I'm just wondering if you had any new observations about kind of his physical status. Yeah, I mean, it's the same, honestly. You know, he still had bruising on his hand. You know, he walks. Did you shake his hand?

I did shake his hand. Was it a very firm handshake that could have caused the bruising? My, no, I didn't, you know, I didn't want to be responsible for a presidential injury, so I kept it, you know, kind of a medium grip. Okay. He has very soft hands. I will say that. You know, he was sweaty when we were walking around outside, but it was hot, so I was also

sweaty. Limp? Did he have a weird, sometimes he's that weird kind of... You know, maybe a little hitch in his step, maybe, but nothing that you would look at and be like, this guy's about to topple over. I mean, honestly, he got around, right? We were outside probably for 45 minutes of the time, and he was happy to be. be out there walking and pointing stuff out.

There was no moment where he, like, needed to sit down or anything. He, you know, he, he pulled his own. Were you there before or after the more, most recent kind of hair change? Well, which, which hair change? The coloring or? No, a couple of weeks ago, his hair went from being quite thin to rather thick, I would notice. Like, just some new follicles really seemed to sprout a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, it looked like the hair that I remember seeing before. I will say staff was very worried about the photographers taking photos of him while the wind was blowing. And so they definitely have it in their mind that they don't want certain shots of what his hair looks like. To me, it looked like, you know, thinner than it used to be, definitely not as dyed as it used to be. He kind of looks like an older man than he did when he was dying his hair. But it didn't look like he had a new weave or anything when I was with him. Okay. That's why it's also good to have on-the-ground reporting here.

You know, it's the podcast. I'm just observing what I could see on the stream. Trump hasn't invited me into the White House. I guess one final question. When you did the soft-hand chick, did any kind of makeup rub off on your hands? No, but I did see. I mean, I could tell that the makeup was there.

Like, it's very prevalent. Makeup on the hands, makeup on the face. I mean, you can see the makeup. A lot of makeup. In person. Yeah, yeah. You can see it. Um, the Federman story.

Uh, you, I think you were kind of the first one to really read a big takeout on this idea that like, it's really kind of bad behind the scenes as far as how staff feels like Federman is actually doing, you know, not talking about the things that people can see in interviews, but just like lashing out, mental health issues, mental laps, like that kind of stuff, um, following the stroke. And this morning, um, as we're taking, um, as we're taping this, there's a story where this seems to be escalating. Some former staff members are sending texts where Federman's talking about how, you know,

basically he doesn't want to meet with wounded veterans. He doesn't want to meet with children's hospital people. All he wants to do is go on Fox. A Twitter account has sprouted in the last hour, claiming that it's going to start dropping a bunch of emails and texts from Federman. I mean, I guess we kind of covered the health part of it last time. It's pretty, I can't really remember anything like this as far as kind of the scale of the staff backlash.

Yeah, it's bonkers. It's, I mean, first of all, amazing reporting by the Wall Street Journal. That's who put it out today. It's fantastic reporting. You know, the story I wrote about Federman is almost a year and a half old, right? So it came out a while ago,

and I felt like it was a very damning portrait of a senator that covered a lot of the stuff that's happening in today's Wall Street Journal story. Not the same events, but the same kind of story. And it was amazing to me that he kind of just kept going about the job. And now, however many months later, the story is coming out again, and we're all being kind of reminded of the same things.

He's doing the same things in some ways worse. And what I found really striking is when I did my story, it was very hard to get staffers, current staffers at the time, and even former staffers to talk to me, to go on the record, and some did with their names on it. And it was very important that I had that. All those people, it was really hard to get them, and I felt very proud of the reporting, and I got this, you know, massive amount of stuff into a magazine article. And all those people have been gone for a long time now.

And so that means that this story that just came out, it's a whole new set of staffers that have had the same experiences and are now turning on their boss, right? And or their former boss, for that matter. And so it really is just like he, not only is he churning through staff, but he's creating a, environment where they're willing to go to the press and say, look at how bad things are. And that's like, I've never heard of such a thing. To have it happen one time is crazy. But to have it happen twice is like how, I don't know. I've never seen anything like it.

Yeah. One of the sources for your original story, Adam Jensen, who is chief of staff, as I have him on the podcast next week. So I'll ask him his perspective on this from a staffer standpoint as well. I'm just kind of curious about yours as a journalist. And obviously it's your job to kind of just get the news out, like the information out, the truth out. Like, that's your job. And yet, I don't know, there's something a little bit uncomfortable about people, like anonymous people. Like, you mentioned your story. This is why

it was important to have people on the record. I do feel a little bit uncomfortable with this, kind of like anonymous people sharing private messages. I kind of, you kind of balance that as a journalist, like whether giving somebody the ability to criticize smear, attack somebody behind anonymous anonymity. Yeah, I mean, I try not to let people. do smearing without their name attached to it. The Wall Street Journal reporting, what makes it so remarkable is, yeah, it's a lot of anonymous people,

but the text messages are not people like talking shit about Federman. It's messages with Federman where he is making himself look bad. And so something like that, I think it's a no-brainer. If a staffer is leaking messages to me, anonymously, but provable, that the senator is saying he doesn't want to go to a funeral for a slain, slain firefighter or whatever it was because it was going to be too long, or he didn't want to

meet with people who were worried about vaccination schedules and Medicaid cuts because, like, he wasn't worried about it. And he wanted to go on Fox News instead. If I'm getting those text messages, I'm publishing those, right? Like, that's not even a question. I do have to say, I was invited to Dick Cheney's funeral. And I do think I asked the comms person what the length was going before I committed to going. So I mean, I would ask the same thing. I'm not a senator. You're not a senator. Also, that's Dick Cheney. I mean, it's a little bit different. Yeah.

I was like, is this a four-hour commitment? Like, you know, how many speeches are going to be? I think his response to the fact that it was three hours was that might be a non-starter. Like, come on, man. And so, you know, for a story like this, it really does feel like whistleblowing more than it feels like anonymous sniping. And I think, you know, it's important that anonymity is maintained and that there are avenues for people to get out information. If this senator is not up to do the job, you know, his voters have the right to know that.

And I think the staffers are doing a service, to be honest. Okay, that's Ben Terrace. You can go read the whole story at New York Magazine, or just kind of go to the Ben Terrace Archive, if you haven't, because it's just kind of banger after banger. So you go check all those out. I appreciate it, brother. Have a good weekend.

Yeah, thank you.