President Donald Trump isn’t tired of winning, and on Thursday, he won again, as U.S. District Judge Richard Leon declined the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s request that he call a halt to the construction of a White House ballroom.
Trump was jubilant, writing:
Great news for America, and our wonderful White House! The Judge on the case of what will be the most beautiful Ballroom anywhere in the World, has just thrown out, and completely erased, the effort to stop its construction. As everyone knows, not one dollar of Taxpayer money is being spent, but rather, all money necessary to build this magnificent building is being put up by Patriot Donors and Contributors. The Ballroom construction, which is anticipated to also handle future Inaugurations and large State Visits, is ahead of schedule, and under budget. It will stand long into the future as a symbol to the Greatness of America! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
The leftist hysteria over pretty much everything they’re hysterical about is ridiculous, but their howling rage over Trump’s ballroom is over the top even for them. The White House is in tremendous need of such a space, as for years it has been holding major functions in a tent.
Presidents have carried out renovations to the White House throughout American history. Harry Truman even gutted the whole structure and had it rebuilt inside. At WhiteHouse.gov, the Trump administration has placed a “Major Events Timeline” in its section on the White House, chronicling many of those changes: “Rebuilding after War of 1812,” “Addition of South Portico,” “Addition of North Portico,” “Addition of the West Wing,” and so on. The clear import of the timeline is to show that the White House has never been a static building, considered too sacrosanct to alter; on the contrary, it has changed quite extensively since John and Abigail lived there.
The timeline notes that there was no Oval Office in the White House until 1909, when “President William Howard Taft remodeled and expanded the West Wing, which included construction of the first Oval Office.” That’s a more consequential change than a ballroom in the East Wing, the sacred and unchangeable part of the White House that Trump is now daring to make the site of his ballroom.
The portion of the East Wing that was demolished to make way for the ballroom is not some historic area where Thomas Jefferson and James Madison once held cabinet meetings; it did not even exist until 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt “constructed the East Wing for additional staff and wartime security, including a bomb shelter.”
Nevertheless, the claim that Trump has committed some unpardonable offense by building a White House ballroom has become a staple of the leftist case against him. Just before the State of the Union address, Bill Clinton’s pint-sized totalitarian Labor secretary, Robert B. “Third” Reich, offered ten reasons why people shouldn’t watch Orange Man Bad speak about the state of the union. One the reasons was this: “He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies, and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that our laws are faithfully executed.”
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Leftists are only enraged at Trump’s ballroom because it is Trump’s ballroom. If Barack Obama or Old Joe Biden had built it, Reich and the others who are wailing about how Trump has “literally destroyed part of the White House” would be hailing the ballroom as the eighth wonder of the world.
But it’s Trump’s ballroom, and so legal challenges will almost certainly continue until the day the ribbon is cut and the place formally opens. Contrary to Trump’s assertion that Leon had “just thrown out, and completely erased, the effort to stop its construction,” the judge actually left the door open for future challenges, saying that he would consider the case again if the National Trust for Historic Preservation made adjustments to its complaint. “Until then, however,” Leon wrote, “I have no choice but to deny Plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction for lack of likelihood of success on the merits.”
There is no doubt that leftists will try again. There is little doubt that they’ll fail again. If Trump wants his ballroom to be free of all legal challenges once and for all, he should announce that he’s naming it after Obama. The leftist confusion will be a gas.
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