Trump blathering about his ballroom might be 'best thing he’s ever done': analysis

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters, as he departs for travel to Pennsylvania from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C. U.S., July 15, 2025. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst

Intelligencer writer Allison Quinn says sometimes a distracted, twitterfaded flake of a leader can show the way forward after tragedy.

“It took only a few hours after the shooting of Charlie Kirk for President Donald Trump to go from urging retribution against the ‘radical far left’ to flogging his new White House ballroom on national TV,” wrote Quinn. “And it might be the best thing he’s ever done for this country, even if accidentally, according to experts on political violence.”

Trump pivoted madly from talk of Kirk’s murder on Friday after a reporter asked him ‘how are you holding up.”

“I think very good,” said Trump. “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years. And it's gonna be a beauty. It'll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

Earlier that day, Trump again spun awkwardly from Kirk to his ballroom while chatting on “Fox & Friends.”

“… He was very hurt when he saw this. I mean, everybody was,” Trump said of Kirk’s death. “When I heard it, I was in the midst of, you know, building a great — for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom, they have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over; if it rains it’s a wipeout, and so I was with architects that were design[ing] — it’s gonna be incredible.”

But Trump’s broken stream of consciousness, however hard critics pan it as a sociopath’s narcissism, could be just what the doctor ordered to break the nation’s dread fever, sources tell Quinn.

“The livestream killing of the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder in Utah on Wednesday has the potential to unleash a wave of further violence — especially if the White House essentially gives the green light for reprisals,” wrote Quinn. “A lack of focused attention, though, might inadvertently serve to lower the temperature in the country.”

“The worst thing that we can imagine is our political leaders inflaming rhetoric and then giving mentally unstable individuals justification to commit additional acts of violence,” said Dartmouth College and Polarization Research Lab Director Sean Westwood, who warns against leaders broadcasting a “false sense of mandate” to carry out more attacks.

While Trump certainly “needs to turn that diagnosis on his own house,” Westwood said, the typically short attention span of the media and those driven by the news cycle might ultimately help to ease tensions.

“I think if we can get through the next few weeks, the risk dramatically decreases until a major event happens,” Westwood told Quinn.

“So, if Trump wants to rant about tariffs and his White House ballroom, perhaps the country should welcome that,” Quinn said.

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.

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