Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump was first elected president about 9 years ago. It seems that, since that time, he has spent much mental energy worrying about where to hold his balls. And now, he has announced his solution: His administration will add an 80,000-square-foot ballroom to the White House, located adjacent to the East Wing.
The response to Trump's announcement was... tepid, at best. The White House is, of course, an iconic structure, and every time a change to the design has been implemented (the addition of the West and East wings, the construction of the Truman portico, etc.), there was blowback just because some people don't like change. Undoubtedly, that is part of the dynamic here, especially since an addition that large would be a pretty big change to the overall look of the building.
That said, we think there are several, more substantive, reasons to look askance at that plan. The first of those, of course, is the grift. When reporters asked how the projected $200 million cost would be covered, Trump administration officials said that it would be paid for by Trump himself and "other patriot donors." When Trump himself was asked if that included foreign donors, he claimed he had not thought about that, and that "You have very strong restrictions. And we go by the restrictions."
Is there any piece of this that is actually believable? To start, Trump never, ever pays for anything out of his own pocket. It's going to be all donor money. And the fact that he's being vague on who those "patriot donors" are, and that it's not credible that he hasn't even thought about foreign donors, then one has to assume that the money is coming from (mostly) foreign people and entities that Trump does not want to announce publicly. The Saudi government is the obvious candidate, though the Qatari government, with its penchant for giving out "free" airplanes, is not far behind.
That moves us to a second, very related, concern, namely that Trump is about to run a version of the Tweed Courthouse scam. About 150 years ago, the very Trump-like urban boss William Magear Tweed persuaded his fellow New York City aldermen that they should allocate $500,000 to build a new courthouse for NYC, to be completed in 6 months. Tweed knew that, once construction begins, it's pretty unusual to reverse course. Naturally, when the 6 months were up, and the $500,000 was all spent, the Courthouse somehow wasn't completed. So, there was another round of funding from the city, and then another, and then another, and then another, and so forth. By the time the project was complete, 12 years had elapsed and $10 million had been spent.
Building an 80,000-square-foot addition to any building is no small task. And when it's the White House, the task gets many orders of magnitude bigger, because the structure has to be extra safe and extra secure (i.e., able to withstand fire, able to withstand a terrorist attack, etc.). It is easy to imagine 12-18 months of planning and pre-construction, followed by an announcement that it turns out $200 million wasn't enough, and another $200 million will be wanted. Maybe there will be two or three such announcements. Meanwhile, Trump has revealed no details about how the "donations" will be held, or who will have control of the money. And obviously, he has made no commitment whatsoever in terms of what will happen if the edifice is only partly complete when he leaves office. It is very much within the realm of possibility that he will find a way to build, say, $20 million worth of structure, pocket multiple hundreds of millions of donations for himself, and leave the next administration on the hook to complete the "Trump Ballroom."
We will also point out one other thing. Elon Musk and his DOGEys cut all kinds of funding from all kinds of places, including aid for food for starving children. It makes a very clear statement of Trump's priorities if he can find $200 million or more for a place to put his balls, but no money for starving kids.
As readers can see from the headline, we have placed this story in the "distractions" basket. We're not as sure of that categorization here as we are with the DoJ stuff (100% certain). But we nonetheless think it is considerably more likely than not that this is one of those bits of information that was going to be released to the world sometime soon, and that a weekend with bad jobs numbers, and in the midst of Epstein Mobilier, was as good a time as any. Meanwhile, we are 100% certain that there is a grifty angle here. The only question is when and if someone will uncover what exactly the scam is. (Z)