Trump’s dream of building a ballroom at the White House is becoming a reality : NPR

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt takes pictures of the new planned Ball House room during a White House press briefing on July 31. According to the White House, the new white house ballroom will be around 90,000 square feet and will cost around $ 200 million.

Mark Schiefelbein / AP

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Mark Schiefelbein / AP

The renderings are finished, the architects and the entrepreneurs have been hired. After at least 15 years speaking, President Trump built a ballroom in the White House. According to the White House, work will start in September, with a price of $ 200 million.

“President Trump is a manufacturer at heart and has an extraordinary eye for detail,” Susie Wiles in a press release said on Thursday. “Trump’s president and White House are fully determined to work with appropriate organizations in order to preserve the special history of the White House while building a beautiful ballroom which can be appreciated by future administrations and the generations of Americans to come.”

The largest event space in the White House is now The East Room, which can accommodate around 200 for dinner. Thus, for decades, when the White House needed more capacity for a state dinner or another major event, they took it outside, generally setting up large fanciful tents, with floor coverings and ages.

Once finished, the White House indicates that the new ballroom can accommodate 650 people.

“The ballroom in the White House State will be an essential and exquisite addition of around 90,000 square feet of innate in innovatively and carefully designed,” according to a press release from the press secretary Karoline Leavitt. She said that the cost would be provided by Trump himself as well as “other patriotic donors”. Leavitt said that the construction would end up “long before” the end of Trump’s mandate.

It will be located where the east wing of the White House is currently located, moving the offices. This space has been renovated several times over the years, according to the White House declaration.

For Trump, this marks the culmination of a long quest to solve the problem of state dinners held in tents which he considers unsightly and too expensive. In 2010, he called David Axelrod, an advisor to the president of the time, Barack Obama, to offer his services a ballroom.

“You know, you have these state dinners and you have them in these small tents’,” said Axelrod told Trump to him. “And he said,” You know, I build ball rooms. I build the largest ball rooms and you can go down to Florida to see them. “”

Axelrod gave the ground to someone else, who did not follow. It is something he says he regrets, not because he thought that a ballroom was a good idea.

“The tent never disturbed me,” said Axelrod.

But Trump has never forgotten the light. Earlier this year, addressing a group of female athletes in the East room, Trump deplored the absence of a larger space.

“It was going to be the reception room. I was going to build a beautiful and beautiful ballroom as I did in Mar-A-Lago,” said Trump. “It was going to cost about $ 100 million. I proposed to do it, and I never heard of.”

Last weekend, when Trump was preparing to chop the last details of a commercial agreement with the president of the European Council, Ursula von der Leyen, in his golf course Turnberry in Scotland, he made a detour to boast of the cavernous room where they were seated.

“You know, we have just built this ballroom, and we build a large ballroom in the White House,” said Trump.

Trump told him that he was only qualified to bring a ballroom to 1600 Pennsylvania avenue.

“No president knew how to build a ballroom,” Trump told Von Der Leyen. “I could take this one, drop it there, and it would be beautiful.”

It turns out that Trump was already on the way to perform in another house hall at home. The White House says that in recent weeks, Trump has held several meetings with the White House staff, the National Park Service, the White House military office and the American secret services to discuss the design and other planning details. Thursday afternoon, he told journalists that the ballroom is a “big inherited project”.

This is only the latest example of Trump’s efforts to put a lasting stamp in the White House. Trump has already made the Oval Office much more golden, added new medallions to the cabinets’ luminaires, placed cobblestones on the place where the grass was in the rose garden and erected new giant masts on the north and southern lawns.

Rose Garden Project is about to be completed in early August, with the cost covered by the National Mall trust.