Weekend meetings and marble floors: How Trump is building his White House ballroom

Trump remodels the White House

For President Donald Trump, the most ambitious construction site in Washington right now is not a bridge or an airport, but the White House itself. He holds weekly meetings where the agenda runs through window sizes, bathroom locations, the finish on door frames and the pattern of marble for the vast East Wing ballroom he has vowed to complete before leaving office, CNN reported.

Samples of stone, fabrics and fixtures are laid out in the Oval Office and the adjacent dining room. Visitors to the building – foreign leaders, members of Congress, longtime friends – are sometimes pulled into impromptu design consultations. Trump, aides say, is relishing the project as a kind of return to his original identity: not candidate or president, but developer.

How he works with architects and builders

People who have built for Trump before say none of this is new. At Mar-a-Lago in Florida, architects recall Saturday sessions where he would spend hours on light fixtures, paint colours and ways to “brighten up” gloomy corners he called “dungeonous.” Project managers describe taking calls at all hours and being pushed to move faster, find workarounds and “pull out a rabbit” when timelines seemed impossible.

Trump is known for marking up architectural drawings in black Sharpie, redlining layouts and elevations himself. If he thinks workmanship or materials fall short, he has been willing to rip things out and start again, even at significant cost. At the White House, that instinct has shown up in details like the Rose Garden paving: after noticing a deep gash in newly laid material, he insisted staff comb through surveillance footage to find who damaged it.

The aesthetic: Gold, marble and showmanship

The ballroom project also leans heavily on Trump’s signature aesthetic. Longtime craftsmen recall decades of work for him centred on gilded finishes, ornate mouldings and highly polished stone. At Mar-a-Lago, those choices created the now-familiar visual shorthand of gold ceilings and gleaming floors that he has partially imported to Washington.

In the Palm Room, connecting the residence and the West Wing, Trump chose a glossy marble that had to be “book-matched” – cut and placed so the veining flows from one slab to the next like a single sheet. Even technical choices get this level of attention: concerned about echo and harsh acoustics in a marble-lined ballroom, he asked an old friend, songwriter Paul Anka, for advice on how to tame the sound in such a hard-surfaced space.

Preservation rules and political shortcuts

Trump’s building style has always involved navigating, and sometimes battering through, layers of regulation. In Palm Beach, he spent years fighting neighbours and local officials over plans to carve up Mar-a-Lago and then turn it into a private club. Because the estate is a designated historic landmark, he also had to seek the blessing of the National Trust for Historic Preservation before adding a ballroom there. The compromise location kept the new structure low, screened by trees, and connected by an awning rather than a grand wing.

In Washington, he has moved much faster. The East Wing was demolished at uncommon speed, surprising preservationists and even some officials inside the administration. The National Trust has warned that a 55,000 square foot ballroom risks overwhelming the proportions of the original mansion and permanently altering its carefully balanced classical design. Trump, however, has shown little inclination to slow down.

He also enjoys an unusual degree of control over the watchdogs. The US National Capital Planning Commission, which will review the ballroom plans, is chaired by his own White House staff secretary, Will Scharf. Trump recently fired six members of the independent Commission of Fine Arts, a body that has traditionally scrutinised changes to the White House, clearing away another potential source of resistance.

Funding, optics and a shutdown backdrop

The money for the project comes not from Congress but from private donations routed through a nonprofit that manages improvements on federal land. Major tech and media companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Comcast and Meta, are among the contributors. They insist their donations follow lobbying and ethics rules; Democrats in Congress are nonetheless probing whether corporate donors are seeking influence.

The timing has magnified the controversy. Demolition and site work have continued during a government shutdown in which the administration has tried to rein in food stamp spending. Democrats accuse Trump of obsessing over a luxury ballroom while basic programmes are strained. Some Republicans, still absorbing poor results in recent off-year elections, worry about the optics of a glittering new hall rising behind construction fences as voters fume about costs and inequality.

For Trump, though, the project doubles as legacy and stage. He shows the model of the future White House to donors and guests, touts the private money paying for it and even jokes with foreign dignitaries about how he wishes he could ask them to contribute. As he once did with towers and golf clubs, he is betting that once the chandeliers are hung and the marble polished, critics will fade and the spectacle will speak for itself. Whether history agrees will depend on how this ballroom is remembered: as a bold architectural flourish, or as the most literal expression of a presidency built around gold, grandeur and constant construction.