These are Corinthian columns,” President Donald Trump tells me as he sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in late August, a stack of printed renderings spread before him. The images show aspects of the ballroom he is building on the site of the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. “That’s your highest level,” he continues. “There are levels of columns: Corinthian, Doric. And to be honest with you, the White House should have used Corinthian. It’s a luxury house, a house of luxury, and they used Doric, which is not as nice. Maybe I’ll fix that, too.”

The White House exterior actually has Ionic columns, but the extent of the president’s architectural ambitions is clear enough. The ballroom is set to be a gold-adorned Roman temple of a building with 40-foot ceilings and 22,000 square feet of space, big enough to hold around a thousand guests. (The structure overall will occupy some 90,000 square feet, nearly twice the size of the main White House building.) The printouts include close-up shots of the ornate carvings — dense layers of leaves guarded by two open-mouthed lions — meant to top the building’s formidable colonnade. Trump says the ballroom shares design aspects with the Palace of Versailles but is in many ways going to be “more beautiful.”

He tells me that advancements have made concrete stronger than ever (“There’s probably no material where there’s been more progress made than good old concrete”), that he is using the best marble in the world for the ballroom’s floor (“I know more about stone than anybody imaginable”), and that the portico will have columns four rows deep (“The Supreme Court is three deep. No other building has it, and I did it because it’s incredible”). He smiles, gazing dreamily into the distance as he describes the cocktail parties and conferences that could soon be held in the ballroom, where no one will have to worry about security. “If you’re making a speech and bullets start getting aimed at the windows, all you’ll hear is ‘ping ping ping,’” he says. “I would suggest you probably stop the speech, but you actually wouldn’t have to, if you want to know the truth.”

There is nothing Trump enjoys more than talking construction — a topic that has defined his second term in office. In less than two years, Trump has nearly finished a new White House helipad, turned the Rose Garden into a sculpture-laden patio, regilded statues standing sentry on the Arlington Memorial Bridge, added his name to the Kennedy Center, and battled with imagined vandals and actual algae blooms in a disastrous attempt to refurbish the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. He has plans to turn a federally owned public golf course into a championship-caliber destination and to build an arch — a Trump-size version of the Arc de Triomphe — near Arlington National Cemetery. Since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has made changes to more than 100 structures in Washington, D.C. The total price tag: somewhere north of a billion dollars. The biggest project, in terms of both cost (estimated to be $800 million when done) and presidential mindshare, is the ballroom and the military bunker that will be tucked underneath.

Trump hopes it will one day bear his name. “It should,” he says. “I don’t know if it will, but it should.” In the meantime, the project has become entangled in questions that range far beyond architecture. Construction has been tied up in legal battles that have reached the Supreme Court. Donors are fretting about whether they could be called in front of congressional panels should Democrats win majorities in the House and Senate in the midterms. And Trump’s record may ultimately be judged by what he has demolished and what he leaves standing in its place. A senior White House official tells me Trump views all this building as part of his legacy. “His rush to get it done in this term is so important because it’s something the Democrats would have a hard time taking away or getting rid of,” he says. “When the ballroom is built, everyone will always know in perpetuity that it was built by Donald Trump. Are Democrats going to come in and rip it down? I have a hard time believing that.”

“I don’t think they could, physically,” Trump says. “It’s made with the most powerful steel welded together and concrete that is so hard and so strong it’s used in nuclear-power plants. You could take a jackhammer and go to those columns and stand there for two days at full blast and you wouldn’t even see a mark. It’s nuclear concrete. I think it would be very hard. It’s meant for if there’s a nuclear attack. I’m not sure you could take it down.”

It can feel as if the 80-year-old president has become obsessed with building something that will outlast him — a literal cementing of his place in history. For opponents, the ballroom threatens to permanently taint the White House with Trump’s petty despotism, spoiling the austere façade that is meant to be a democratic rebuttal to the gaudy trappings of Versailles and other monarchical displays of power. It is also a test of whether anyone — Congress, the courts, the opposition party — can stop a president who has become even more unbound in his second term.

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia who is considered a potential presidential candidate, made headlines earlier this year for positing that Trump is building monuments to himself because he knows no one else will do it once he’s gone. When I put that idea to Trump, he does not dispute it.

“That’s true,” Trump says. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Trump peers out the window of the Oval Office overlooking the Rose Garden, behind which two enormous cranes rise high above the ballroom construction site. “If you want,” he says, “I’ll take you over there.”

In the spring of 2010, David Axelrod, then the senior adviser to President Barack Obama, got a call from Trump. “I build ballrooms,” Axelrod recalls Trump telling him. “I build the greatest ballrooms in the world — come down to Florida and see for yourself. You have these state dinners, and you have them in these shitty little tents in the back. It’s not befitting. Let me build a modular ballroom for you. You can put it together, take it apart.” The idea struck Axelrod as preposterous. “We were just coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and I’m pretty sure no one in America thinks our priority should be a ballroom for the White House,” he tells me. Still, he passed on the message to the White House social secretary, believing that someone would get in touch with Trump. For whatever reason, no one called Trump back. “He was owed a call,” Axelrod says. “I have no excuse for that.”

Fifteen years later, Axelrod has occasionally wondered whether history might have gone differently had they humored him. Would a few shoulder-to-shoulder photographs at a groundbreaking ceremony have been enough to prevent Trump from spearheading the birther movement and descending the golden escalator in 2015? Axelrod thinks not, but there is one counterfactual he entertains: “If we had let him build his modular ballroom, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to demolish the East Wing. And in that sense, I kind of regret not doing it.”

Trump tells me he holds no grudge about the matter but says he learned something about the Obama administration. “They’re not good businesspeople,” he says. “If somebody offers you a free ballroom, take it, right?” If Obama’s aides forgot about Trump’s proposal, he did not. By January 2016, he had incorporated it into his presidential campaign. In Sioux City, during a campaign event before the Iowa caucuses, Trump explained what his administration would bring to Washington. “We’ll get the top people, top everything — we’ll have the best ballroom,” he said. “Because I notice they always put tents up on the lawn. No. 1, it’s not a good security thing. No. 2, the guy that owns the tents is making a fortune.”

Trump says during his first term, he learned just how badly the White House needed a ballroom. It was embarrassing, he says, to bring foreign dignitaries over, but the timing never felt quite right to undertake a construction project. “In the first term, I was under siege,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel it was the atmosphere.” Now, he says, “is a much more powerful time.”

The first step — raising money — proved incredibly easy. Millions poured in from Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Lockheed Martin, Coinbase, Microsoft, and Comcast, to name just a few. The Winklevoss twins donated, as did Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson. “People were unbelievably enthusiastic and honored to have a part in an American legacy project,” says Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke. “It took literally a matter of weeks.” One Republican lobbyist who raised money for the ballroom tells me the pitch he gave his clients was simple. “You’re either on the team or you’re not, and if you’re on the team, there are certain benefits to being on the team,” he says. “If he has a project he cares about, make a decision to be a part of it.”

Breaking ground on the project proved easy too. The demolition of the East Wing occurred without forewarning in October. To start building, Trump then needed to submit plans to two relatively unknown commissions: the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. He appointed three loyal aides to the NCPC: Will Scharf, Stuart Levenbach, and James Blair. The shake-up at the CFA was even more dramatic. In........

© Daily Intelligencer