Usually, the Trump administration has to run all the way to the Supreme Court to be allowed to do whatever illegal thing it wants to do. But when it comes to President Donald Trump’s gilded AI-designed slop of a ballroom, the lower court just did him a solid and said, sure, keep building the monstrosity, as long as you pinky swear to submit plans later.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is chartered by Congress and charged with protecting historic structures, sued the administration last week over the Mar-a-Lago Palantir Donald J. Trump Paramount OpenAI Ballroom, or whatever it’s going to be called.
But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, said that the Trust didn’t show it would face “great and certain” harm if Trump continued his underground construction, even though no plans have been submitted to the required federal review panels.
The East Wing of the White House is demolished on Oct. 23.
Leon did very sternly tell the administration that it has until the end of December to submit those plans, and the government is on “fair notice” that, if any of the construction were to prevent the court from ordering a later change, “the government should be prepared to take it down.”
Sure, that will definitely happen. Trump will absolutely obey you and remove the construction you’re letting him build right now. You have definitely been paying attention to his administration.
Rest assured, Leon says that there will be a hearing in mid-January to determine whether the administration is following the requirements.
Reader, the administration will not be following the requirements.
Indeed, the Trump team is already telegraphing how it will delay this. One of the review panels to which the administration is required to submit plans functionally does not exist right now because Trump fired all of its members when he started destroying the East Wing.
The administration’s lawyer told Leon that Trump needs to appoint new members to the group, but we know full well that he will not do that in the next two weeks, so you can expect that ballroom construction will be continuing in the new year, and there will be nary a plan review.
The timing of this litigation is predictably smug. The demolition already happened, so it’s too late to sue the administration over that. And nothing has been built above ground yet, so it’s too early to sue over that.
Meanwhile, the ballroom is now going to cost $400 million—double what it was projected to cost just two months ago. This is definitely how normal government construction works, right?
