You can see why Donald Trump wants to build a “big beautiful ballroom” at the White House. At the moment he’s forced to squeeze his formal functions into the much smaller East Room in the main executive residence, where there’s barely enough space for the poor man to dance the “Y” in YMCA without accidentally uppercutting one of his corporate friends in the ear.
There’s also the tent-on-the-lawn option, but the Trump administration thinks that’s “unsightly”, presumably because it is so much harder to dress a marquee in gold – any respectable quantity of the stuff will only make the fabric sag.
Luckily the US president’s pals in the technology, cryptocurrency and defence industries are all huge fans of dancing, which is why so many of them are chipping in to the worthy cause of constructing a 90,000sq ft ballroom with windows made of bulletproof glass.
There, once the assiettes of desserts have been traded to everyone’s satisfaction and the tables folded up, the paying guests will be able to tango, foxtrot and kowtow the night away. Dance like JD Vance is watching, lobby like you’ve never been hurt.
READ MORE
Comcast, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Coinbase are among the behemoths to have reached into their back pockets to help out with this $250 million – or possibly $300 million – mission to make future White House events significantly less exclusive than before.
The contribution of Comcast, the only media company on the list, didn’t go unremarked upon on MSNBC, the defiantly non-Maga news network that Comcast owns for just a little while longer. (It’s scheduled to be spun off into a separate entity.)
Public-facing donors to Trump’s ballroom blitz, including Comcast, “should know there’s a cost in terms of their reputation with the American people”, said influential host Rachel Maddow, while colleague Stephanie Ruhle noted “there ain’t no company out there writing a cheque just for goodwill”.
But who knows? Maybe this is just an unusually altruistic act on the part of men such as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and newlywed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to pay for a warehouse-sized ballroom where the chances of being bumped off the top table by Conor McGregor or Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman become exponentially higher. Maybe a little distance is what they actually crave?
[ Trump’s White House destruction: It’s as if he’s tearing down a gas stationOpens in new window ]
Sufferers of formal-event anxiety will know there’s a psychological as well as a spatial difference between a venue that seats 200 people, as the East Room does, and one that fits 999, which is Trump’s latest indication of what his ballroom’s capacity will be.
If all goes according to plan, the new ballroom will be so huge it will even be capable of staging one of those mega, whole-of-town Irish weddings where a surreal collection of giant inflatable objects abruptly materialises at midnight and somehow falls into the hands of the most extroverted guests.
[ As the diggers tear into the White House, Trump is reminded: ‘It’s not yours’Opens in new window ]
Trump, like a true bride, isn’t leaving anything to chance. This week, his administration dispensed with the services of all six existing members of the Commission of Fine Arts, the independent federal agency charged with reviewing his Washington DC building projects, including the ballroom and an arch, splendidly nicknamed Arc de Trump, that he’s apparently paying for with money left over from the ballroom whip-round.
The commission is closed at the moment anyway “due to a lapse in federal appropriations” – the US is having one of its periodic government shutdowns – but the outgoing group of architects and urban planners will no longer be tasked with giving their expert advice on how to “preserve the dignity of the nation’s capital”.
Dignity, after all, is yesterday’s vibe. The only surprise here is that Trump has bulldozed the East Wing of the White House to construct a humble ballroom and not the Washington DC equivalent of the Las Vegas Sphere. You’d have thought he’d have fancied putting his name to an illuminated spherical arena gargantuan enough to be seen from space, not the kind of room where people get murdered in Cluedo.
As it goes, polls suggest almost two-thirds of Americans are against the ballroom project, either because they don’t like wrecking balls being taken to places of historic importance, they don’t believe the official stance that the ballroom is a “much-needed and exquisite addition” to the White House, or both.
Maybe some are nostalgic for the days when John Travolta, egged on by first lady Nancy Reagan, needed nothing more than the Entrance Hall of the White House to invite Princess Diana to dance, providing the official photographer with an image of such quaint potency that people – and not just the Saturday Night Fever star – still call it “magical” 40 years later.
What’s the best vicarious entertainment that a hastily constructed, gaudily decorated Trump ballroom will be able to muster? A ridiculously long conga of world leaders and tech billionaires might be our only hope.
