Today, Explained - Trump’s Ballroom Blitz

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

President Trump is racing to finish his ballroom, and if the Supreme Court doesn't stop him it will have major implications for conservation efforts around the country. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. President Donald Trump speaks to the media alongside posters of his proposed White House ballroom amid construction at the White House. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The United States featuring Israel has been at war with Iran for six whole months now. And sure, like, the president cares, but sometimes it seems like he cares more about his ballroom. He wanted to talk about it when he was supposed to be doing a Medal of Honor ceremony back in March. I believe it's going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world. And when you hear all that hammering out there, you know why the First Lady is not thrilled, exactly. Sometimes he uses foul language to describe what the White House looked like before he showed up with his bulldozer. Normally I would have said it was a shithouse, but I don't want to say that. But just listen to how happy he sounded talking about it Monday at a back-to-school event.

The kids could see construction. I love the sound of construction. Like the president, we hear it today explain from Vox are going to talk at length about the ballroom because we got a lot of ballroom drama. We got cost drama. We got who's foot in the bill drama. We got legal drama. We even got implication drama coming up.

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working across every system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Sarah Blaskey is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, and lately she's been investigating the president's big ballroom, which she'll be the first to tell you is kind of hard to see. Well, I think most people in the city know that there are fences and fences and fences keeping all of us from the construction area. And so what any reporters see is basically what the president wants us to see. He has done a couple of tours of that area.

And you'll see right alongside of it the great structure that's rising right next to the White House, and that's going to be the ballroom slash military complex. It's incredible. There will never be another. building like this, Bill, I built a lot of great things. There will never be anything like this, Bill. Granted, has a million-year life. It's a very strong stone.

It will never break. It will never leak. It will never do any of it. This is the highest quality stone you can get. He's brought all the press corps out there and shown this massive hole in the ground at one point that construction was happening. And now, the more recent visits have shown that construction is above ground. They're one or two stories up at least in some parts of this ballroom.

And so it really is taking shape. You can kind of see a building there now where there used to be a hole. And can you remind people what exactly we're building here and what it's going to look like as far as we know? To our knowledge, there are kind of two parts. The below-ground part, which is going to have some military facility. Sometimes they refer to this as the bunker. They've said that it's going to be nuclear resistant at this point. that it could withstand, you know, a direct hit of some sort.

Not only is it drone proof. If a drone hits it, it bounces off. It won't have any impact. It's also supposed to have a state-of-the-art medical facility and some other national security-related things that perhaps they haven't told us about and shouldn't tell us about, right? And then there's what's above ground,

and that is this 90,000 square foot ballroom. And what's the construction like? I mean, this has been going on. for almost a year-ish, and I'm guessing is going to take a fair amount more time? So the schedule that the government has said in its various court filings is that this won't be done until the summer of 2028. So we're still not even halfway, right? We're at the phase of construction where there's concrete and there's a lot of rebar, but it's the kind of concrete that starts looking like walls or at least columns and that kind of thing above ground. So it looks like a building.

it just looks like a really concrete structure. You know, none of the finishes are there yet. You know, the fundamentals of the structure are in place. And the government is saying they're 65% of the way done. They haven't explained that number, but that's what they're saying. And a lot of us were used to seeing pictures of that hole in the ground. I mean, between October and the beginning of this year, it was more of a demolition project than it was construction. And they've really ramped up the construction in recent months.

When President Trump pitched this idea to the American public, one of its chief selling points was, you're not going to pay for it. My friends are, essentially. Has that proposition evolved as well? Publicly, he continues to say that. So all of this was paid for by myself. And because I keep hearing like, I'm not, we are making a gift of this. This is a gift. This is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer.

But internally, my colleagues and I have gotten some records, basically budgets put together by the general contractor on the project, that show not only is the price tag a lot higher than the president has said publicly, but also that about half of it is coming from American taxpayers. Ah. From funds from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House military office. And that is not something that we've heard the president acknowledge publicly to date. And also to go back to that question of how much is this costing? Some of these internal records show us that originally it was going to be in that 200 million range that the president announced last year when he said he wanted to do this project. And then it bumped up to 400 million. And we've heard him acknowledge that, he said.

It's going to be close to $400 million. And it's all paid for by patriots and patriotic companies, big companies. At that point, we can already see in the internal record. that in fact the plan was to have part of it paid for by donors and part of it paid for by U.S. taxpayers. And then by March, that price tag had gone up again to $600 million. That is the internal estimate for construction alone. That doesn't include the design or anything like that, but the construction itself.

So that demolition of the Old East Wing, the construction of what's going to be in its place, that includes the below-ground stuff and the above-ground stuff, the entire structure. $600 million is. the estimate as of March, again, half of it coming from taxpayers. Okay, so we went from two to four to $600 million. And according to the schedule that the White House itself is putting out there, there's years of work that remain. Is that legal? Can he just say, oh, yeah, it's going to cost double, triple what I thought it would,

and also I'm pulling that money from the Secret Service, from the White House military office? In theory, you know, in a vacuum, it kind of seems like, no, right? Congress controls the purse strings. That's one of the powers of Congress. But in practice, the administration has made arguments, like, that they believe they're allowed to do this

through some legal mechanisms that have been set up that allow transfers of funds from one agency to another with a whole bunch of rules attached to it. That is beyond my pay grade, as they say, to determine whether this particular transfer of funds was legal. But one thing I will say is they've set up basically a piggy bank for their White House projects in this little known office called the executive residence. And the executive residence normally employs housekeepers or the calligrapher works in the executive residence. Okay. I didn't know there was a calligrapher. I'm going to be honest. The White House has a calligrapher. I approve. Yeah, and florists and housekeepers and all the people that maintain the executive residence, right?

They have an annual repair and restoration budget of about $2.5 million. So that account, repair and restoration, which previously was for like, you need some new curtains or you need to maybe replace a floorboard or small things, right? that account is now being used to fund this ballroom. And so they're hoaring hundreds of millions of dollars into this account. It's now at, I think, over $800 million in that tiny account alone. And that's the fund they're using to pay. Wow, much like leveling the East Wing itself, this all sounds very messy.

Is anyone keeping track of the money that's coming in and going out to this project? This is a question that the Senate Appropriations Committee would take. potentially there are staffers on the hill who are looking into these questions because the question of whether those transfers were legal is something that politicians on both sides of the aisle lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said they have questions about given the scale visibility and long-term implications of this project an independent government accountability office review is essential to ensure accountability transparency and responsible management of federal resources

historical assets. Were these funds intended for something else? And if so, what were those things? And what is the legal mechanism used to transfer them for this project? And those questions have not been answered yet. They're just beginning to be explored. But the Supreme Court had an opportunity late last week to sort of halt the whole thing. As a lower court, I believe, wanted.

But they said, nah, go ahead. and we'll get to this when we get to this? The Supreme Court is considering a case in which a nonprofit organization sued the federal government saying that they did not have the legal authority to knock down the former East Wing of the White House and then construct a massive 90,000 square foot ballroom in its place. And since about December, this court case has been working its way through D.C. District Court, then there was recently a decision in an appellate court a few weeks ago. The appellate court upheld the determination of the D.C. court, which said this was not legal.

They need to go through Congress to do this work. And now it's on its way to the Supreme Court. And we actually just heard on Friday a preliminary decision that allowed construction to continue, at least for now, on the East Wing project, until the Supreme Court has more time to consider. One thing that occurs to me here is the amount of money we're talking about is orders of magnitude more than what this administration was spending on the reflecting pool earlier this summer. And yet earlier this summer, it felt like the whole country, maybe even the world, had its eyes on that reflecting pool. And it became a huge controversy and a huge story. And yet it doesn't feel like people are that mad.

about what's going on in the East Wing with this ballroom project. Why do you think that is? Well, I think the reflecting pool is quite literally out in public. People can see it and they can walk by it and they saw this whole thing unfolding. Whereas the East Wing construction is happening behind all these fences. You can't actually see it. There are a couple of vantage points in Washington. If you don't have access to the White House, there are only a couple of places you can go up on a

couple tall buildings nearby, where you can even see the construction site. And so I think for some people, it's a little out of sight, out of mind. But I will just also say this. I think Americans on both sides of the aisle, again, actually do deeply care about the ballroom. I think we're hearing from a lot of them. I'm sure you've heard from a lot of them. They have questions about the funds. They have questions about the priorities. They have questions about the president being part of some of the negotiations of the price of concrete himself when maybe he could have been focused on other things. There are a lot of questions. And so to the extent that the reflecting pool was more talked about earlier this year, I think it was just the visceral fact that we could all just see a green

pool in the middle of National Mall. This ballroom business is about more than the ballroom, according to one Ian Milheuser, who you'll hear from next on Today Explained. Support for the show comes from ShipStation. If shipping is an essential part of your business, you can't afford to get it wrong. You need to get it right. You need your order fulfilled to be fast, efficient, and cost effective.

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Ballroom slash military complex. It's incredible. Today, explained Sean Ramos from now joined by Ian Milheiser senior correspondent at Vox. Ian, people are saying this ballroom is illegal. It's really cut and dry here. Yeah, the ballroom is illegal. Let me just walk you through the statutes here. The main law, I'm just going to read this statute to you, says, A building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the federal government in the District of Columbia without the express authority of Congress. So that sounds pretty clear.

Like, I'm not a Supreme Court expert like you. And even I understood that. Yeah, really clear. The White House is a public grounds of the federal government within the district. District of Columbia, Trump is erecting a building on it sure seems illegal if he doesn't get congressional permission. Then two months since Cruz started tearing down the east wing of the White House without federal approval. A U.S. court has ordered President Trump to halt the work on a $400 million ballroom being constructed on the site of the demolished east wing of the White House.

The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Trump's $400 million white house ballroom is unlawful and requires congressional approval. So how is the Supreme Court? then on the way to rubber stamping this ballroom renovation? In cases involving environmental laws, conservationist laws, historical preservation laws, Congress often passes laws because they want to maintain something beautiful. You know, think about something like the Grand Canyon. Like, we don't maintain the Grand Canyon because, like, people are going to make a lot of money off of the Grand Canyon.

We don't maintain the Grand Canyon as part of a crime prevention strategy. We maintain the Grand Canyon because it's gorgeous. And we want people to be able to go and see this beautiful thing. And if someone were to like put a strip mall in like the side of the Grand Canyon, it would be less beautiful. And so Congress can pass a law saying, no, you can't build there. We're going to maintain this beautiful thing. There is a rule. It's called standing.

If you want to file a federal lawsuit, you have to show that you've been injured in some way by. by the person or the entity that you were suing. So like, if you punch me in the face, I could sue you because you punching me in the face injures me. Ow, Sean. I would never. You would never, of course. You're totally nonviolent.

But if you punch me in the face and one of our colleagues gets mad about it and wants to sue you over it, oh, Sean. They can't do it because they haven't been injured by your fist. Only I've been injured by your fist. Is that what's happening here? Well, so the question essentially, is it. is whether someone has gotten a fist to the face, at least in a way that the law recognizes. And what the court has consistently said is that if you intend to go there and someone's going to do something to this beautiful thing that's going to make it less beautiful, you've been injured and you're allowed to sue.

And that is the theory in this case. There is a woman. She belongs to a conservationist organization. That is the plaintiff in this case. She says that she frequently goes by the White House. She's actually a retired professor of architectural history, so she knows a lot about this stuff. She thinks that the White House is beautiful. She enjoys seeing it. She incorporates it into her research. And if the East Wing is replaced by this eyesore of a ballroom, then it's going to be less beautiful.

It puts the emphasis on the wrong place. The emphasis should be on the White House, the center of our government, the head of state's house and office. And instead, it's a distraction. It takes all your attention to something big and irrelevant and asymmetrical. It's called an aesthetic injury. If you feel like a defendant has taken a beautiful thing that is preserved by law and made it less beautiful, you are allowed to sue under existing law. And the question is basically whether the Supreme Court is going to change the rules to say that that's not enough. And what are the implications if they do? Because you wrote for our yellow website, vox.com, that this isn't just about the ballroom.

Right. I mean, the implications are enormous. If you take away the right to sue because, you know, something beautiful is being destroyed, then a whole lot of these conservationist laws, a whole lot of these laws doing with sacred sites and, you know, pristine sites, environmentally protected sites, just become unenforceable. I'll read to you what One of the lower courts said would happen if Trump's theory of who has standing were adopted. Under Trump's, quote, cramped standing theory would deem no one injured by a decision to raise the statue of liberty, to obscure the names of the Vietnam War Memorial, or to install a political billboard atop Mount Rushmore. Wow. Think of why you go to see the Statue of Liberty.

Like, I mean, you don't go to the Statue of Liberty because it makes you money. there isn't a material gain you get for the Statue of Liberty being there. There's a beautiful monument that we want to preserve. And if the government were or someone were to come and like tear the torch off the Statue of Liberty, the reason you would be harmed by that is because you would no longer be able to see this beautiful thing that used to be there. And so right now the law allows you to sue to prevent that beauty from being destroyed. That's the crux of this case, whether or not people are allowed to sue in order to prevent the destruction of something beautiful. But why would the Supreme Court want to give this president or any president the power to just run roughshod over our national monuments?

It is an excellent question. I mean, there is one other aspect to this case that I haven't mentioned before, which may be driving the justice is thinking. And that's that the ballroom isn't the only thing that's being built at the White House. So above ground is the ballroom. Below ground is this, it's like a five-story, like, you know, 50-foot deep bunker. And the White House tries to claim that the ballroom and the bunker are all one project. And so if you block the ballroom from happening, you are harming national security because you're preventing Trump from building this bunker. They're making the argument that this is all about security, that if they were to stop work on the ballroom,

it would not only have an impact on national security, but on the safety of the president himself. You know, that started off as a ballroom. And before we started work, the military came to see me and they say, sir, we have an opportunity to do something incredible here. And we've been trying to do it for a hundred years. Horts tend to be very deferential to the president when he brings. up national security. And so, like, it's possible that the justice just don't want to second guess the president because he's used the magic words national security. And do we have any evidence as to whether that was a strategy here to get this ballroom through while, as you say,

clearly violating the law? I think it's probably a strategy here that, like, you know, it's savvy to tie it to national security. I also think it's kind of a dumb strategy, though. Because like, the thing that struck me when I was reading Trump's brief it is, I mean, like, I don't think he should have torn down the East Wing and I don't think we need this eyesore of a ballroom that's completely changed the footprint of the White House. But I think the case for the bunker is actually pretty compelling. I mean, you know, this is the president of the United States. He's the commander in chief of the U.S. military. There are obviously like our enemies have a strategic interest in taking out the president or rendering the White House in operable if it can. And I think if Trump had gone to Congress and said, hey, like, there's a really strong national security need for this bunker. Will you appropriate $400 million so that I can build it?

I mean, I think Congress would have said yes. And like, then we wouldn't have a Supreme Court case over this. Then we wouldn't have a fight over it. Then they would have legitimacy. And then we wouldn't have the potential for the Supreme Court to make a decision that could actually have implications for all of our national parks and monuments. Well, the one thing that he probably couldn't have gotten money for, of course, is the ballroom. And that might be why Trump didn't go to Congress. Because if he had gone to Congress, they probably would have given him the money for the bunker.

He would have built the bunker. But he would have had to put something that looks like the East Wing on top of the bunker, and he really wants the ballroom. And so, like, I think there is a bit of gamesmanship going on here, where, you know, Trump's lawyers know that the Supreme Court often defers when the president says the words national security. And so if there's some way that they could present the ballroom as part of a national security project and not just as some Ozzymandian vanity project by Trump, then, you. You know, it's more likely that the part of the justice brains that turn off whenever they hear the words national security kicks in and the ballroom happens. Ian, Vox, Sarah, Wapho, Danielle Hewitt, Miranda Kennedy, Gabriel Donatav, Patrick Boyd, David Tadashore, Dolly Parton, Today Explained. Two in five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters.

On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.ca.