In October of 2025, President Donald Trump razed the East Wing of the White House to the ground to make room for a massive new proposed ballroom. As of January 2026, the site remains empty, and construction may never get off the ground before Trump leaves office. Now, one journalist is making the case that the potentially permanently stalled ballroom serves as the ideal metaphor for Trump's second term.
In a Wednesday article for The Atlantic, writer David A. Graham observed that Trump has failed to learn the lesson as president that he should have learned as a real estate developer — destruction is always easier than building. He argued that this applies both to his ballroom project and his policy agenda, both of which have caused rampant destruction but have yet to bear fruit.
As Graham explained, Trump's ballroom construction has been put on hold following a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group National Trust for Historic Preservation. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of former President George W. Bush) indicated in a hearing last week that he would likely rule in plaintiffs' favor. He scoffed at arguments from Trump administration attorneys that the ballroom – whose cost has ballooned from $200 million to $400 million in a matter of months – was no different than other modest updates to the White House, like former President Gerald Ford's addition of a swimming pool.
The Atlantic author noted that regardless of Judge Leon's decision about whether to allow construction to continue, it will almost certainly be appealed by either plaintiffs or the administration, extending the battle in court for an indefinite period of time while the construction site sits empty. According to Graham, should the demolished East Wing never be anything more than a mound of dirt and a smattering of machinery, it would be a "fitting monument to the Trump presidency."
"DOGE found it relatively easy to destroy USAID, but the administration hasn’t been able to create any new way of extending soft power around the globe," Graham wrote. "Leveling threats of tariffs on adversaries and allies alike has been relatively easy, but the result has been a weakening of the economy and American trade ties, and a crumbling of the old global-trade system. He has been unable to bring a huge boom of manufacturing jobs and factories to U.S. shores."
"Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement has deported so many people, led so many people to leave the country, and discouraged so many people from coming that U.S. population growth slowed dramatically between June 2024, near the end of the Biden administration, and July 2025, according to numbers released this week by the Census Bureau," he continued. "Yet the right’s hope for pronatalist policies that would try to drive up birth rates have amounted to little."
Graham argued that just as Trump's vision of a grand White House ballroom continues to be stymied by cost and complexity, so too are his policy visions. He wrote that while the president teased having "concepts of a plan" to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act during the 2024 campaign, he has so far been unable to "put together anything resembling a real blueprint for improving health insurance." And he posited that the Trump administration's "Make America Healthy Again" agenda has yet to deliver anything other than "undermining the existing institutions and practices of American public health."
"Some Democrats have said that any new president who replaces Trump should move promptly to tear down his ballroom," Graham wrote. "If the project never moves forward, though, they’ll have no need."