Mr. President, Build Away: Notes from the Ballroom of Coincidence

The Washington Hilton ballroom is the kind of place that smells like steam-table chicken and old champagne. The kind of place where, on any ordinary Saturday night, a sitting president tries out his B-material on a press corps that has long since stopped laughing for free. This was not an ordinary Saturday night.

Saturday night the gunfire started around the time a mentalist named Oz Pearlman was performing a card trick for the president of the United States. I did not make that sentence up. I would not know how. A 31-year-old California engineer-turned-teacher named Cole Allen apparently decided the security screening line outside the Hilton was the place to make his case, and the Secret Service decided this was a good time to remove the president from the premises. The mentalist's trick, the ducking under tables, the cabinet officials being shoved into motorcades — all of it became, with the speed that only American politics can manage, a real estate argument.

By Sunday morning the Justice Department had its talking points. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — a name I keep typing like a typo, Acting, Attorney, General, Todd, Blanche, as if the words form a sentence by accident — issued a letter to the National Trust for Historic Preservation with a deadline. Drop your “frivolous lawsuit” against the Trump ballroom project, the letter read, or “the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night's extraordinary events.” Nine A.M. Monday. Comply or be deemed unmoved by violence.

This is where I want to be very clear, because the line between dark farce and ordinary cynicism keeps wandering off-leash in this country: the National Trust for Historic Preservation is not a shadowy ring of agitators. It is a non-profit Congress chartered in 1949 to preserve the buildings the country has agreed not to bulldoze. They sued in December because they believed a sitting president could not pour concrete on the White House grounds for a private ballroom without congressional authorization. In late March, Judge Richard Leon agreed, ruling that no statute “comes close” to giving the president that authority. He paused construction. He later restricted it to below-ground work only. A federal appeals panel then split the difference and let the digging proceed into June.

The DOJ's argument now is that a man with a rifle outside the wrong hotel has rendered the entire question moot.

I do not have words for this. Or rather, I have several thousand of them and none of them are polite.

Trump's own pitch on Saturday, made after he was rushed away from the dinner, was that the ballroom must be built because the ballroom is “drone proof” and has “bulletproof glass.” He said the Secret Service and the military are “demanding” it. He said the country has wanted this ballroom “for 150 years.” This is the same president who, in July of 2024, stood in front of a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania and survived an assassin's bullet by perhaps a centimeter and walked away with a fist in the air. The man knows from incoming fire. And his takeaway from a gunman in the screening line at a hotel a mile and a half from his house is that what America really needs is a private banquet hall on the South Lawn. The economy is on fire. The planet is on fire. Anyway, we are getting a ballroom.

By Sunday evening the cosponsor lineup was already forming. Lauren Boebert of Colorado announced she was drafting legislation, posting that congressional approval probably wasn't even required, but, sure, fine, “if it'll keep activist judges on the sideline, so be it.” Florida Rep. Randy Fine unveiled a bill titled — and I would like a moment of silence here — the Build the Ballroom Act. Fine called the lawsuits “nonsense” and challenged Democrats to repudiate violence by cosponsoring his banquet hall. “Mr. President, build away,” he wrote. Tim Sheehy of Montana announced his own version in the Senate, calling the proposal “common sense” in the same breath he called the country “an embarrassment.” There is a 71% chance no member of Congress so publicly devoted to the ballroom has ever attended a wedding in one. There is a 100% chance somebody is going to slip “drone-proof” into a press release this week and we will all just keep walking.

You start to see the shape of the thing. The shooting was not really an argument for a ballroom. The lawsuit was not really an obstacle to security. Both of those framings are theatrical. The real machine here is older and slower and more obvious: a private project, privately funded by donors who would prefer the receipts not be subpoenaed, gets a federal protective coating sprayed onto it in the smoke of a national tragedy. The court loss becomes a thing of yesterday. The injunction is dissolved on the grounds of having looked at television. The donors get their plaques. The ballroom gets built. The next gala goes off without a hitch, and the only people left out in the cold are the historians and the press corps and whatever grand jury was warming up in some adjacent room before everyone forgot what it was assembling for.

There is something distinctly American about the way grief gets converted into floor space. Some countries put up a memorial. We put up a banquet hall. The bullet becomes a deposit. The funeral becomes a fundraiser. Somewhere a man in a suit is telling another man in a suit that the gold leaf needs to ship by Tuesday, and that the Acting Attorney General will handle the lawyers, and that we should plan to host the inaugural reception in November.

Outside, the swine are still moving in the long grass. They smelled the gunpowder on Saturday and they liked it. They have always liked it. They will tell you the ballroom is for democracy, the same way they will tell you the bunker is for guests. They will tell you Cole Allen was the reason and not the excuse. And on Monday morning, at nine sharp, they will go to court and ask the judge to please, in light of recent extraordinary events, sign here.