Dem
47
GOP
53
To hear Donald Trump tell it, the White House desperately needs a massive ballroom, because, um...
reasons. Indeed, it's hard to understand how Franklin D. Roosevelt won World War II, or how the Nixon
administration managed to put men on the moon, without adequate space for their balls. Trump also
insists that the new ballroom needs to look like Louis XIV's personal decorator had a psychotic
episode very classy.
The new design has already been approved by the Commission of Fine Arts, which was generously salted with Trump sycophants. Yesterday, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) was supposed to vote on whether it would give its approval. And by statute, the NCPC must open projects to public comment, and must consider that feedback. As you might imagine, this particular project attracted a few comments. In fact, it got more than 35,000 of them, filling more than 9,000 pages.
The majority of the comments are negative, as you might guess. How big a majority? According to an analysis by CNN, 97%. The volume of comments is so vast that the PDFs of them posted to the Internet by the NCPC had to be broken into many different pieces. Here is the largest of those files, for anyone who cares to peruse some of the feedback themselves. A (very partial) list of words that appear 100+ times:
Care to guess which of these words appears most frequently? We'll tell you at the end. Meanwhile, here are some other phrases that make an appearance (sometimes many appearances):
Yep, people are not happy.
By all indications, the NCPC was ready to give the thumbs up yesterday. But once the members became aware of the tone, tenor and number of comments, they decided they needed more time to think. So, they will vote on April 2, instead. We imagine that this extra month is merely intended to give the impression of deliberation, and that they will give their stamp of approval on that date. We also imagine that if they don't vote to approve, Trump will just ignore them.
That means that if you're in the (apparent) 97% that dislikes this whole scheme, your best hope probably still lies in the several court cases in which the expansion is being challenged. As Trump himself has demonstrated, time and again, it doesn't matter if you win, as long as you can just run out the clock. We would guess that "ballroom project" does not qualify as "high priority," so this could well get pushed back until there's a new president who will actually cross the t's and dot the i's and perhaps even bring a little discretion and taste to the whole thing.
Meanwhile, we recognize that the 97% who sent in negative comments are a self-selected group, and do not precisely reflect the views of the larger populace. But the polls do show it's about 2-to-1 against, with virtually all Democrats and two-thirds of independents hating the idea. It is a rare politician who would move forward with something that unpopular. But Trump, of course, rarely backs down on ego-related things like this. Plus, he's now got a big hole in the ground, so he's pretty much stuck at this point.
Oh, and the most common of those words: "monstrosity," by a long shot, followed by "gaudy," "gilded," "vanity" and "disgrace." (Z)