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The Ballroom Is Him
April 18, 2026
Posted 4 hours ago by
Trump’s temple/ballroom obsession says everything about him. And it’s not good: With so many lives at risk in the Middle East in recent weeks, it seemed frivolous if not immoral to care whether the White House got a new ballroom. It just did not seem to matter much, then, now or ever. And yet the president of the United States, who would seem to have more reason than most to obsess over the war, insisted even as bombs were falling that the ballroom was “very important”.
And so maybe attention should be paid. [] [O]n March 31st a federal judge, Richard Leon, ruled that in demolishing the old East Wing and starting to build his addition, which at 90,000 square feet is nearly double the size of the White House mansion, Mr Trump usurped Congress’s authority. Judge Leon, a conservative, peppered his irate opinion with exclamation marks, responding to some of Mr Trump’s claims with an eye-rolling “Please!” Still, all Mr Trump needed to do, Judge Leon wrote, was to get Congress’s authorisation. Pending that, he blocked construction except as needed for security. Mr Trump’s lawyers responded on April 3rd with exclamation points of their own, in an appeal declaring the president to be within his rights. With Trumpian redundancy they thrice called the ballroom “desperately needed”, and they declared it beautiful. But they also insisted it “serves mission-critical national security goals”. The roof, for example, is meant to be proof against drones. Regardless of who prevails in court, the legal
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