We’re not at war right now, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson. The U.S. and Israeli governments are not aware of a strike on a girl’s primary school in southern Iran that killed 165 people, most of them girls aged 7 to 12, and wounded close to 100 more. Reports on the deaths of six U.S. troops killed in an Iranian drone attack are just attempts by “fake news” outlets to make President Donald Trump look bad, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Since there’s clearly not much of interest going on right now, perhaps we should turn our collective gaze to the one thing Trump can’t stop talking about: his $400 million, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom. “I picked those drapes in my first term—I always liked gold,” said Trump at a Medal of Honor ceremony for three Army soldiers earlier this week. “I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
The ballroom will be almost twice the size of the actual White House. It is being built on the site of the demolished White House East Wing and is being funded by Trump himself as well as his good friends at Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir. The Lutnick Family is also a donor. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of the panel’s investigation into his close relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The National Capital Planning Commission released more than 9,000 pages of comments denouncing the project this week. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration in December over the project, claiming the White House had been carrying out the construction unlawfully because Trump hadn’t gotten approval from Congress or submitted his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts for review.
The Commission of Fine Arts signed off on the project last month and the National Capital Planning Commission is also expected to give their seal of approval.
The gilded ballroom is reminiscent of the Palace of Versailles, built by French “Sun King” Louis XIV. His reign lasted for more than 72 years, the longest of any monarch in history. The inside of the palace was a testament to gold-plated opulence, while the estate’s Royal Menagerie boasted expansive gardens and exotic animals including ostriches and an elephant.
The Sun King eventually made Versailles the de facto capital of France, first using it to promote himself to European nobility through a series of nighttime festivals. It was leveraged to court elites and leaders from around the world, with an Embassy from Iran visiting in 1715. The Palace was a center of diplomacy, lobbying, intrigue, spying and all manner of scandal.
Louis XVI would be the last King of France. It was during his reign that the lower and middle classes rose up, the French Revolution began and the monarchy was abolished. Louis XVI was seen by many as the embodiment of elite tyranny, an example of old money excess that had outrun its course and was standing in the way of the principles of Enlightenment that would usher in a new age of the democratic republic. Louis and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were both famously arrested and executed by guillotine, and Versailles became a public establishment.
Trump’s gold-plated ballroom and its corporate benefactors are a stark reminder of what happens when elite power goes unchecked for too long. That it’s being constructed in the midst of what could become World War III, while an unprecedented global money laundering and sex trafficking scandal is being actively suppressed by his administration, is a disgrace.
Trump views his ballroom as the crowning achievement of his Presidency, a testament to the wealth and influence of his family and close friends, members of an elite billionaires club that don’t need planning permissions to get things done and unequivocally don’t need to respect laws.
We can only hope The Golden Ballroom goes down in history as a symbolic turning point for the United States. A time when citizens realize the two-party system they’ve been yoked under for so long does not represent their interests or their wellbeing. When they realize their federal government is designed to polarize and oppress them while ensuring One Percent of the global population keeps getting richer and more influential while the bottom tier experiences calculated and systemic suffering.
Extreme imbalances of power tend to be great equalizers. Now is the moment to level the playing field.