President Donald Trump’s White House construction goes beyond a ballroom, the commander-in-chief told reporters on Tuesday as he stood outside the construction site detailing the complexities of the massive addition.
“You might want to take a look at the complexity,” Trump said as he gestured toward the construction site on the premises. He explained that the ballroom is only part of the story. In fact, he described the ballroom itself as a “shield” of sorts, protecting all of the space currently being built underneath. That includes a military hospital, meeting rooms, and much more.
“These are all different rooms out here,” Trump said. “They’re building a hospital. They’re building a military hospital. They’re building all sorts of research facilities — also meeting rooms and rooms that go hand in hand for the military, using the ballroom, and the ballroom is really a shield and protecting all of the things that are built here.”
Trump explained that the construction already goes “very deep” — six stories deep.
“This is down because we’ve already done these floors, but these are already down two floors. That is down about six stories deep. That’s fixed up normally,” he said, walking through other features and complexities of this design.
“It’s all knit together between the drone proofing [and] the missile proofing. We have had the drone capacity upstairs. We can have all sorts of military up, whether — I hate to use the word snipers, but we have great sniper capacity,” the president said, revealing that it is “built for our snipers, not the enemy snipers.”
“And because of the height, we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington,” Trump said.
Trump’s brief tour followed the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determining that a plan drafted by Republican lawmakers to provide $1 billion in funding for the White House ballroom project did not follow the rules, although Republicans say they have a fix underway.
As Breitbart News detailed:
Republicans are using budgetary reconciliation to fund the ballroom and the Border Patrol as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Using reconciliation would allow the funding package to pass through the Senate with only Republican support.
However, there are strict rules by which the legislation must abide to ensure it does not violate the Senate’s rules on reconciliation.
Democrats took this ruling as a victory, even though Republicans said they have a fix coming in.
Despite that, President Trump is reportedly calling for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to fire MacDonough.
Critics have continued to attack Trump’s plans for a big, beautiful, and secure ballroom — which has evolved into a multipurpose underground facility. However, a president upgrading the White House is not unprecedented. White House renovations are nothing new but typically drip with controversy, despite the fact that the present-day White House has almost no connection to the original home started by President John Adams.
As Breitbart News detailed, “The only thing connecting the current structure to the barely ‘habitable’ building that Adams first entered is some of the sandstone exterior walls.”
That aside, there has, in fact, been a renewed sense of need for a secure ballroom at the White House following the thwarted assassination attempt weeks ago at White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton weeks ago.
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“What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE,” Trump said on Truth Social after the foiled shooting attempt.
“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!” he added.