Authoritarians and their bunkers have a long and storied history. Probably the most well-known was Adolf Hitler, who spent his ignominious final hours holed up in a bunker in Berlin. And in recent weeks, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has been hiding out from a rumored incipient coup in a palatial bunker of his own. Now, wonders i Paper contributor Sarah Baxter, has President Donald Trump “entered the bunker phase of his presidency?” Maybe or maybe not, but two things are certain: he is building a bunker, and he “knows” his presidency is failing.
According to Baxter, evidence of Trump’s inclination to hunker in his bunker came earlier this week, when he expressed hesitancy at leaving the White House to attend his son’s wedding, saying, “Uhhhh. He’d like me to go. I’m gonna try and make it. But it’s going to be just a small, little private affair… I said, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’”
As others have pointed out, his desire to remain on and fortify the White House campus has grown over the course of his second term, particularly since the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April. And while he’d already been pushing for his ballroom for a year at that point, his brush with death spurred him to make it a key priority and crank up the security costs.
Writes Baxter, “For an estimated cost of $1 billion, a bill taxpayers would foot, the ballroom will extend six floors underground, with its own command and communications center, military hospital, and a hardened roof of ‘impenetrable steel’ with a base ‘for unlimited numbers of drones,’ Trump said excitedly on a tour of the site. There can be no more powerful symbol of a president under siege.”
But Trump’s project has hit a roadblock as Congress has balked at his billion-dollar request, with Democrats using parliamentary procedure to kill the funding and Republicans panicking in the face of growing midterm headwinds. The president’s tendency to attack those in his own party by endorsing primary challengers has only entrenched resistance, as “the finely-balanced Senate and House now harbor several seriously disaffected Republican lawmakers who have suddenly found a spine now they have been deselected and have nothing left to lose. They are bent on scuttling Trump’s plans.”
What’s more, writes Baxter, “Indulging the President — whose approval rating stands at just 35 percent, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll — risks alienating the substantial slice of voters outside the Trump bunker who are furious about inflation, fuel prices and the Iran war.” But, “Trump usually gets what Trump wants, so I wouldn’t set too much store by these stirrings of rebellion. He is more disinhibited than ever and less inclined to care what anybody thinks.” And with the ballroom construction already underway with a projected completion date of late 2028 — right before Trump is supposed to leave office — some have suggested that he might follow Putin’s example and attempt to stay put.
It’s not such a far-fetched assertion. Following his loss in 2020, Trump reportedly told an aide, “I’m just not going to leave,” telling another, “We’re never leaving — how can you leave when you won an election?” And while on the campaign trail in 2024, he himself said, “I shouldn’t have left.”
So with that in mind, “What are the odds that, come January 2029, Trump will be holed up in his bunker, refusing to leave the White House?” Baxter wonders. “If I were a gambler, I’d place a bet in the prediction markets on this.”
