After suffering a crushing legal setback over his $400 million to $600 million “big beautiful ballroom,” President Donald Trump is changing tactics, scrambling to rebrand the unapproved vanity project as a “military center” and threatening to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In a 2-1 ruling handed down on Aug. 7 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which sided with historic preservationists, judges said the construction project is illegal because Trump did not get congressional approval before tearing down the East Wing of the White House last year.
The court issued a scathing rebuke of Trump, calling him a ‘temporary tenant’ who did not have the legal right to remake the White House.
Court of Appeals’ Opinion Cripples Trump
In the majority opinion written by two Obama-appointed judges, the court said: “Executive actions that take control of that property out of the hands of the people’s representatives while irreparably harming the historical and visual architecture of perhaps the most prominent public building in the United States seriously intrude on the public interest.”
The opinion continued, according to MS NOW: “We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.”
The 136-page decision said Trump did not have the right to alter the property.
“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence. The President has no … constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people. … Whether or not a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide and is not a matter for Executive self-help.”
Trump Rants About Court
An outraged Trump took to social media, lambasting the decision as “unjust” and vowing to appeal the “unjust decision” to the highest court in the land.
But in a sly move, he’s now trying to recast the massive White House modification from his long-stated goal of a 90,000 square-foot ballroom to a crucial national security project needed to protect future presidents and Washington residents overall.
“Two Obama and Biden Appellate Court Judges just voted against the desperately needed Military Center, required for the National Security of Washington, D.C., and our Country, itself,” Trump whined in a post on social media.
“We will be immediately appealing to the United States Supreme Court,” Trump declared before insisting that delaying the project “severely jeopardizes the lives and welfare of the people who work, and will be working, at the White House — including all future Presidents of the United States, and their families.”
Trump also griped about the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which brought the original lawsuit.
“This unjust decision must be overturned by the Supreme Court in its entirety.”
The Public Sees Through Trump’s Move
Social media had a field day blasting Trump over the unapproved project and joking about his attempt to now characterize it as something other than a ballroom.
“Yesterday it was a ballroom. Today it’s a military center. Tomorrow it’ll be a pediatric cancer hospital for bald eagles,” a Threads user comically noted.
This commenter pointed out, “The designation as a ‘military center’ makes it a defense allocation and therefore an even more illegal action. If he maintained the fiction that it was merely an extension of the entertainment facilities of the White House, he’d have a better argument for why it’s okay for him to build it unilaterally. But he’s too stupid to realize that.”
Another had just two words for Trump, “Nice try.”
Poster Bella Connors suggested, “He knows he’s already out the door; he’s grabbing at any straw he can find.”
The appeals court blocked the aboveground construction for two weeks to allow Trump time to take his case to the high court.
When Trump first announced the huge ballroom project, he claimed private donors and not American taxpayers would foot the $220 million bill.
The renovation costs soon ballooned to over $400 million, and this spring Trump started lobbying his Republican cronies in Congress to attach the ballroom’s cost to the U.S. Secret Service budget.
That hasn’t happened … yet.
