Trump offers to build $159m ballroom at White House
The US president, who has criticised the practice of hosting foreign dignitaries in ‘old, rotten tents’ on the lawn, said he would pay for the extension himself.
President Donald Trump has proposed building a $US100 million ($159m) ballroom at the White House to host parties and state dinners, promising to pay for the grandiose extension himself.
He said during a signing ceremony in the East Room, the largest in the building, that he wanted to build a ballroom “like I have at Mar-a-Lago”, his Florida estate.
The proposal would stop the need for receptions in tents. Trump said the East Room was “packed” but there were “people outside that can’t even get in”.
He added that he had already offered to build a ballroom. “It was going to cost $US100 million,” he said. “I offered to do it to the Biden administration.”
David Axelrod, an adviser to Barack Obama, said Trump made an initial offer to build a ballroom in 2010 after seeing a state dinner for Manmohan Singh, India’s late former prime minister, on the White House lawn.
He wrote in his memoir, Believer, that Trump said: “I build ballrooms. Beautiful ballrooms. You can go to Tampa and check one of them out for yourself.”
Trump, 78, told the East Room audience that he would repeat the offer. “I’m going to try and make the offer to myself,” he said, to laughter. “We’ll see if Trump will approve it.”
The White House reception room can seat 120 people for dinner.
The dinner for Singh and about 350 guests was held in 2009. Vanity Fair wrote that the event was staged in a “massive pavilion, complete with an orchestra platform, theatrical lighting, a professional sound system, full heating”. The magazine said it took five days to construct and estimated its cost at more than $US100,000.
Trump thought it was a disgrace, however. He told Rush Limbaugh, the political commentator: “When a dignitary comes in from India, from anywhere, they open up a tent. An old, rotten tent that frankly they probably rented, pay a guy millions of dollars for it even though it’s worth about $US2.”
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump suggested it was unsafe to hold state dinners under canvas and added that he had built at Mar-a-Lago “what many consider to be the single greatest ballroom in the world”.
After his election that year, Cindy Adams, a New York Post columnist, said that he would rectify the situation swiftly. “The White House lacks a big party space,” she added.
Trump failed to build a ballroom but his wife Melania oversaw the design and construction of a tennis pavilion.
The president suggested, however, that he now had big plans. “I was going to build it right there,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. The East Room, which was built initially as storage space, “was going to be the reception room,” he added.
William Allman, a former White House curator and a co-author of Furnishing the White House: The Decorative Arts Collection, said Trump might have been thinking of building on top of the East Terrace, which leads out of the reception room.
Trump revived the idea of building a ballroom the day after he suggested clearing out and renovating the Gaza Strip.
“We could use a bigger room, right, Marsha?” he said, apparently addressing Marsha Blackburn, 72, the Republican Tennessee senator. “It would actually be a beautiful addition.”
The Times
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