The Daily Populous Thursday March 19th, 2026 night edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by NamelessResearcher

A federal judge has slammed Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing and plan to build a $400m ballroom where it once stood as “brazen”, and has indicated he might terminate the project later this month.

“I’m struggling to see this as an ‘alteration’,” Judge Richard Leon said on Tuesday during a hearing in a lawsuit brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) seeking to halt construction until the president has won congressional approval and passed independent reviews.

White House lawyers have argued that Trump does not need outside permission to pursue the project, which began with demolition of the East Wing in October, and which he aims to complete by 2028.

He has frequently boasted about the project, which critics have said is a thinly veiled attempt to re-create the opulence of Mar-a-Lago, his gilded Florida mansion, in the capital.

His lawyers have advanced a number of arguments in defense of the 90,000 sq ft ballroom, including that it was needed for “national security”, that Congress had already allocated millions of dollars for alteration and maintenance of the president’s residence, and that it was exempt from congressional scrutiny because it was mostly funded by private donors.

In October, Trump fired all six members of the independent US Commission of Fine Arts responsible for reviewing the ballroom plan, and replaced them with handpicked designees who gave their unanimous consent last month.

The National Capital Planning Commission, a separate federal body reviewing the project, said earlier this month it was postponing its vote of approval to April, citing a need to assess a “large amount of public input”.

At Tuesday’s hearing in Washington DC, Thaddeus Heuer, attorney for the NTHP, accused the Trump administration of a “months-long merry-go-round ride” over responsibility for and authority over the project, delaying the legal process until it was too late to stop it.

“What they can’t do here is have it both ways,” he said, reported by the Hill.

Heuer said the administration had “forgotten the proverbial first law of holes … When you find yourself in one, stop digging,” according to the Washington Post.

The government’s machinations found little favor with Leon, a George W Bush appointee who is set to rule on the preservationists’ lawsuit by the end of March.

“This has been a case where there have been shifting theories, shifting dynamics, I regret to say, from the beginning,” he said, adding there was “no track record” of the administration authentically following traditional approval processes.

To justice department lawyer Yaakov Roth’s assertion that the ballroom project had a “dual source of funding and dual source of authority”, and was therefore outside the court’s purview, Leon said it was a “brazen interpretation of the law’s vocabulary”.

Calling the White House “a special place”, he added: “This is an iconic symbol of this nation.” Trump, he said, was not the owner, but a steward on behalf of the nation.

Leon has previously ruled against the NTHP, which contends that the demolition was illegal, and that Trump lacks the legal authority to impose his private whims on the historic building. The judge denied its first request for an injunction last month on procedural grounds, permitting building work to continue, but allowed it to file an amended complaint that he is weighing now.

“The [NTHP] should not even be afforded another try,” justice department attorneys wrote in a court filing last week, urging Leon to dismiss the case. Trump posted falsely on social media last month that the judge had “completely erased” the effort to halt the ballroom’s construction.

On Tuesday, Leon appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument that previous presidents had made unilateral alterations to the White House, including Gerald Ford’s installation of an outdoor swimming pool in 1975.

Leon said in his February order that he expected his decision to be challenged whichever way he ruled, and that he saw the case “squarely” in supreme court territory.

bill4935 on March 18th, 2026 at 16:58 UTC »

The American people expected that $400 million dollars to be put to good use. For the President to just say "we're gonna spend $450 million on a big room" is ludicrous, but this is 2026 after all and we should have guessed that that 500 million dollars would be wasted. It's not like he had any good suggestions for six hundred million, right?

Anyway, $750 million isn't enough to solve the world's problems, but it's almost enough to surround Trump with golden walls and slightly warm chicken dinners on Corel plates. It's just a single billion. He spends more than that each day just trying to raise the price of oil to where Putin wants it!

GringottsWizardBank on March 18th, 2026 at 16:43 UTC »

After the east wing was already demolished. Hilarious

HenryDorsettCase47 on March 18th, 2026 at 16:25 UTC »

“Plan”