At long last, it looks like President Donald Trump’s big, ugly ballroom project may have finally hit a snag.
True, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon hasn’t yet ruled, but Thursday’s hearing in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s lawsuit seeking to halt construction of this gold-plated nightmare didn't go well for the administration.
Fam, is it good when a federal judge calls your funding a “Rube Goldberg Contraption,” one designed to sidestep the need for congressional authorization? At least Leon didn’t call the ballroom donation jamboree what it really is: an innovative and exciting way for rich donors and giant corporations to bribe Trump on the down low.
Debris is seen at a largely demolished part of the East Wing of the White House on Oct. 23, 2025.
When Leon asked Department of Justice attorney Yaakov Roth why the administration didn’t just seek funding and authorization from Congress, Roth tried to say that Trump is just so concerned about spending taxpayer money.
“The president didn’t want $400 million in taxpayer money to be used for this. He wanted to use donations,” Roth said.
This might, in theory, address the funding issue—if we just close our eyes and forget about all of the bribing—but it in no way explains a refusal to obtain congressional authorization.
Roth also floated a “not fair, guys! Other presidents did it too” argument, pointing out that Gerald Ford built a swimming pool without having to ask Congress. In response, Leon came as close to open mockery as one might expect from a 76-year-old George W. Bush appointee.
“The ‘77 Gerald Ford swimming pool? You compare that to tearing down and building a new East Wing? Come on. Be serious,” Leon said.
Roth also tried to say that the administration would be “irreparably harmed” if construction were paused. This is true only if one agrees with the DOJ's standard position that Trump is irreparably harmed whenever he is not allowed to do exactly what he wants, and that if courts try to stop him, it makes the Constitution sad.
Related | Not even Trump knows what the hell he’s doing with his dumb ballroom
But if that doesn’t work, how about some rhetorical incredulity from Roth: “Are we going to suspend construction in the middle?”
Well, yes, actually. And for all of Roth’s feigned disbelief, he was perfectly aware this was the possibility the administration faced. Leon said as much in December when he refused to grant the Trust’s request for a temporary restraining order halting construction.
In ruling that the Trust hadn’t shown it faced harm that was “certain, great, actual, imminent, and beyond remediation,” Leon said that he based that ruling on the administration’s representations that underground construction for the ballroom wouldn’t begin until February 2026 and that plans as to size and scale weren’t finalized.
In other words, the administration prevailed in December by arguing that the Trust couldn’t be facing imminent harm because no irreversible construction was yet underway. But in January, the administration’s argument became, “Well, now that we’re in the middle of things, you can’t possibly stop us.”
President Donald Trump holds renderings of his ballroom monstrosity on Oct. 22, 2025.
Heads, Trump wins. Tails, everyone else loses.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the DOJ also trotted out another favorite argument: Building the ugly ballroom is a matter of national security. That’s theoretically possible, given that Trump’s destruction of the East Wing also meant the destruction of the White House bunker beneath, which is being rebuilt as part of the ballroom project.
But according to Roth, bunker construction can’t continue if ballroom construction doesn’t continue because “it can’t be divided that way.”
Come on, man. Do you hear yourself?
The ballroom is a perfect example of the problems arising from the collapse of institutional checks on Trump. No one with the power to do so stopped him from tearing down the White House—looking at you, congressional Republicans. That left courts with the only imperfect, incomplete remedy of temporarily or permanently halting construction.
Sure, the East Wing is already gone, and the foundations for Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac are already in process. Normally, it would be far better to see something—anything—get built rather than have a massive excavation scar marring the White House grounds.
But disturbed earth and half-built pilings will always look better than whatever Trump’s monstrosity of a monument to himself was ever going to look like.
