Trump comes up with a weird pitch to advance his ballroom project
Even as Donald Trump remains hyperfocused on his White House ballroom vanity project, the president’s initiative isn’t exactly on a winning streak. A growing number of congressional Republicans have voiced public opposition to public funding for the project; recent polling has shown most Americans are against the whole idea; and the endeavor has suffered some early setbacks in the courts.
For his part, Trump isn’t just sticking with the project, he’s also concocting new defenses for it. USA Today reported:
President Donald Trump unveiled yet another purported justification for his controversial plan to build a massive new ballroom and bunker under the East Wing of the White House he demolished: a rooftop “DronePort” that he says is needed to defend the nation’s capital from modern threats.
In a lengthy Truth Social post on Sunday, May 31, Trump claimed the proposed drone facility would be “perhaps, the most sophisticated anywhere in the World” that’s needed to safeguard Washington, DC, “long into the future.”
In recent months, the White House has repeatedly suggested the ballroom has a national security component, which many have long assumed referred simply to the construction of a presidential bunker.
But this past weekend, Trump took this line of argument in a deeply odd direction, publishing an item to his social media platform on Saturday showing a mock-up image of military drones atop the prospective ballroom’s roof.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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