Bush aide tears Trump apart for breaking a big ballroom promise

U.S. President Donald Trump talks while holding up renderings of the planned White House ballroom, aboard Air Force One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., March 29, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

After initially promising his White House ballroom would not be charged to American taxpayers, President Donald Trump recently declared that he does indeed want US citizens to pay for his ballroom — and a presidential aide to the last Republican president just called him out for it.

“Lindsey Graham wants Donald Trump not just to have a corrupt, paid-for ballroom by the corporation, but a taxpayer-paid-for ballroom to the tune of half a billion dollars,” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush, said on Wednesday. “My god, you could buy a Bezos yacht for that amount of money.”

When arguing for a White House ballroom, Graham claimed that the $400 million price tag would include “a lot of military stuff."

"There will be a Secret Service annex, and we've paid for it by offsetting it with custom fees," said Graham. "But the estimate is $332 million. We're going to do $400 million because I think it's probably going to take more. Private donations can be used, but I think they should be used for buying China and stuff like that. Underneath this ballroom will be infrastructure that is national security centric. The ballroom itself will avoid the dilemma of having to leave the White House grounds with future presidents and this president to go downtown in a place that's less secure.”

Graham echoed the argument made by Trump supporters (as well as Sen. John Fetterman, D-PA) that a White House ballroom would have made the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) shooting impossible, even though the WHCD events have always been held in private locations.

But Schmidt countered that “The ballroom must never, ever be built."

“Donald Trump knocked down the White House. He tore down the East Wing, and it was not his to tear down. It's the people's house, and it's his honor to live there for a time, and then he leaves. Look what he's done to the Oval Office — the walkway between the residence and the Oval Office. All of it's coming down, and what should sit there for the next three years is this pit. It should be a symbol of his disgusting presidency. It's a symbol of his incompetence, his lack of planning — an open-air memorial to his Iran war.”

Over the past few months the White House ballroom has been one of Trump’s top priorities, with him mentioning it far more often than issues of immediate concern to the American people like the affordability crisis or his scandalous friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

“Trump has invoked the ballroom on about a third of the days this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of his public remarks and social media posts, a pace that rivals and even exceeds his mentions of some major policy priorities,” The Washington Post’s Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond observed earlier this month. “He has mentioned the project on fewer days this year than topics such as tariffs and Iran but on about as many days as he has mentioned health insurance and ‘affordability.’” He has also promoted his ballroom “significantly” more often than his TrumpRx website, “which his administration introduced to help Americans shop for cheaper prescription drugs.”

Nor was that all.

“In April, for instance, the president has issued more posts about the ballroom on his Truth Social platform than about tariffs — Trump’s signature economic policy,” Morse and Diamond added. “On Thursday, the president took to Truth Social to complain about the federal judge who ordered a stop to the project until Trump receives congressional authorization, complain again about the judge, complain about the plaintiff, and then complain about the judge one more time — yielding nearly 800 words of invective, all told. Then, within minutes, Trump shared all four posts again.”

From Your Site Articles