President Trump is building a massive, privately-funded ballroom at the White House because the current setup forces world leaders to eat state dinners in a tent on the lawn like it’s a backyard graduation party. CNN thinks 32,000 angry internet comments should put a stop to that.
Somebody get Anderson Cooper a tissue. The people’s house is getting an upgrade and the people who don’t actually pay for it are losing their minds.
Here’s what happened. The National Capital Planning Commission opened a public comment period on Trump’s $400 million East Wing ballroom project. The internet activists pounced. Over 32,000 comments flooded in, with CNN breathlessly reporting that 97% of them were negative. Sounds devastating, right?
Not so fast. About a quarter of those comments — around 8,000 of them — were copy-paste form letters traced back to one creative writer named Anara Guard, whose complaint got amplified on Facebook by a mystery novelist named Sara Paretsky. So a fiction writer got a mystery writer to help gin up a fake grassroots campaign against a building. You genuinely cannot make this stuff up.
The remaining comments included such devastating critiques as calling the ballroom “gaudy,” “hideous,” and comparing it to a “brothel” and a “Vegas casino.” In other words, people who have never been invited to a state dinner have very strong opinions about the aesthetics of state dinners.
When asked about the tsunami of opposition, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the commenters “Trump deranged liberals lacking taste.” She’s not wrong.
Let’s talk about what CNN keeps burying at the bottom of every article about this: the ballroom is privately funded. Not a dime of taxpayer money. Thirty-seven private donors — including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Lockheed Martin — are footing the $400 million bill. But sure, let’s pretend this is some outrageous abuse of government spending.
You know what IS an outrageous abuse of spending? The current system. State dinners at the White House are held either in the East Room (capacity: 200 people, elbow to elbow) or in a temporary tent erected on the South Lawn that costs over $1 million per event. A former White House chef described the tent situation as “embarrassing.” Foreign heads of state fly halfway around the world to eat filet mignon in what amounts to a wedding reception tent. At least at a wedding you get an open bar.
Meanwhile, every president since Teddy Roosevelt has renovated, expanded, or added to the White House and nobody said a word. Roosevelt built the entire West Wing in 1902. Taft added the Oval Office in 1909. FDR built the East Wing in 1942 — the very building that was demolished to make room for the ballroom. (Irony alert: FDR built it as a cover story for a secret wartime bunker. Nobody organized a letter-writing campaign about that.) Truman gutted the entire White House interior and rebuilt it from scratch for $5.7 million — over $50 million in today’s dollars. Nixon converted FDR’s swimming pool into the press briefing room and added a bowling alley. Ford put in an outdoor pool.
But Trump builds a ballroom with other people’s money and suddenly it’s the fall of the republic.
The best part of the whole circus? The construction is already underway. The East Wing has already been demolished. The pile drivers are running from 6 AM to 11:30 PM — Trump said so himself at a Medal of Honor ceremony where he pointed at the golden drapes covering the future ballroom entrance and said, “When I hear that sound — that beautiful sound behind me, it means money, so I like it.” Even Melania is complaining about the noise. (She asked, “Will the pile drivers ever stop?” Apparently not.)
CNN and the Washington Post are covering this comment campaign like it’s a legitimate uprising. It’s not. It’s an astroturfed tantrum organized by Facebook activists who are mad that a building they’ll never visit is being renovated with money that isn’t theirs. The NCPC vote was pushed to April 2, but the commission is chaired by Will Scharf, a Trump appointee, and stacked with loyalists. The outcome is about as suspenseful as a Harlem Globetrotters game.
Here’s where this is going. The ballroom gets built. The April 2 vote is a formality — the building is already half-constructed and the commission that votes on it works for the guy who’s building it. Within a year, CNN will be running glamorous photo spreads of the first state dinner held in the new ballroom and pretending they never opposed it. That’s always how this works. They screamed about Trump’s Oval Office renovations, screamed about the Rose Garden redesign, and then quietly used those spaces as backdrops for their own broadcasts.
Mark my words — five years from now, the White House ballroom will be one of the most photographed rooms in America, it’ll be on the official White House tour, and exactly zero of the 32,000 commenters will still be upset about it. The mystery novelist will have moved on to her next book. The creative writer will have found a new Facebook cause. And Trump will have given America a world-class state venue that every future president — Democrat or Republican — will be grateful exists.
But sure, CNN. Keep covering the angry internet comments like they matter. That strategy has worked out great for you so far.