Pod Insights If You're Listening Trump’s grand designs for the White House About this episode The construction of Trump's new White House ballroom would make for maybe the best episode of Grand Designs ever made. The budget has blown out, a historic wing of the house has been demolished, and it's putting a strain on President Trump and Melania's relationship.
Sadly, Kevin McCloud wasn't available for this episode. Instead, Matt is talking to White House reporter for the Washington Post, Dan Diamond, who has watched, and heard, all of it go down.
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0:08 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis, the host of the ABC's politics podcast, Politics Now. The budget was the pitch. This week, the real test begins. Can Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers land their key measures? Or will Parliament force Labour back to the negotiating table? We're watching the deals, the pressure points and the political consequences. The final biffo before the big winter break. We'll bring you up to date on Politics Now. Follow on ABC Listen so you never miss an episode.
0:37 Speaker 02 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people.
0:47 Speaker 02 G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. When I was in Washington 18 months ago for the US election, producer Murray Adam and I wanted to film one of our episodes outside the White House. We had a bit of trouble, however, getting a shot set up as construction for the presidential parade was blocking all our best angles. We ended up setting up south of the building. It was a perfectly good shot, but it meant that I had to stare basically directly into the sun and couldn't really read my teleprompter. These days, though, the level of construction in Washington is significantly more than that. As we talked about in our last episode, the White House lawn was recently home to a temporary UFC octagon to celebrate the president's birthday.
1:28 Speaker 02 The Kennedy Centre was briefly rebranded the Trump and Kennedy Centre before reverting to being the Kennedy Centre again. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was painted blue, then went green, and then the blue paint seems to be peeling off again. But all of that pales in comparison to what's happening to the White House itself, which has been partially demolished by President Trump, who is in the process of replacing the East Wing with a new state ballroom. Dan Diamond is White House reporter for The Washington Post. He has been watching and probably hearing all of this happen around him for the last few months. Hello, Dan. Thanks for joining us.
2:10 Speaker 03 I'm happy to be with you and I'm not the one who hears it the loudest. It's Melania Trump who has been dealing with the loud noises of the White House ballroom.
2:23 Speaker 02 Yes. Well, is it just jackhammers all the time at the moment?
2:26 Speaker 03 I have been over there when the building is shaking. And this isn't always because of the ballroom. It's because of other projects that President Trump is trying to do as well. But it's nonstop. He has been overhauling the campus and overhauling all of Washington.
2:38 Speaker 02 We've had a lot of requests from people to talk about this ballroom on the show. The story is quite complex and strange. But to start at the beginning, before Trump's announcement that he was going to do this, what was the White House's capacity for holding large events like?
2:55 Speaker 03 There is a room in the White House called the East Room that can hold maybe several hundred people. It depends on the setup. But President Trump has said that is not enough and that events need to be able to hold hundreds of people, if not a thousand people.
3:09 Speaker 04 This was the ballroom and this room holds 88 people. And the new one will hold 999 people, which is a difference.
3:17 Speaker 02 So when President Trump first announced this project, what was the scale of what he was promising to do?
3:24 Speaker 03 Initially, the president talked about a $200 million ballroom that would be close to the East Wing, but not tear down the East Wing. The White House was very clear on this point about a year ago.
3:34 Speaker 04 It won't interfere with the current building. It'll be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest fan of. It's my favorite. It's my favorite place. I love it.
3:46 Speaker 03 And there were concerns, the idea of a major new construction project on the White House grounds, had historic preservationists, had architects and others wondering what this might be. But I think there was also a belief that any major change to the White House was not going to be imminent, that it would have to go through months, if not years of reviews, because we've seen this in the past, Matt.
4:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely.
4:09 Speaker 03 When there have been projects at the White House, it is not an overnight change. It's usually something that gets hammered out over a very long time, like the change to the White House fence in recent years. That was something that was begun under President Obama, but it wasn't finished until 2020, the last year of President Trump's first term. And that was just a fence. That wasn't building a new building.
4:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's something that we experience here in Australia a lot as well, you know, new infrastructure project will be announced and we'll go, okay, well, I'll believe it when I see it. But within a really short period of time, there was significant changes happening at the White House, weren't there?
4:46 Speaker 03 I remember the morning well, Matt, because I was in our White House team meeting. I had been out on paternity leave last year and Jonathan Edwards had slid in on our team and done a few stories on the ballroom while I was out. So I was actually not that deep on the ballroom. But we were in our White House meeting and Jonathan passed us a note essentially saying, I hear that they are tearing down the East Wing.
5:05 Speaker 05 Today bulldozers are taking down the entire historic East Wing of the White House to make way for President Trump's 90,000 square foot ballroom.
5:14 Speaker 03 He even had a photo and we couldn't believe it. We thought maybe this was AI, maybe this was, you know, some Democrat trying to make President Trump look bad. We ran around that morning. I found a second source essentially, and then the Post broke the news that the East Wing was being torn down. And even now, as I talk about it, I mean, it was surreal. No one could believe it because there have been major projects before, but not one where the President of the United States takes a wrecking ball essentially to a third of the White House.
5:43 Speaker 02 Literally, very literally.
5:44 Speaker 03 So Matt, I think one reason people in America have gotten so attached to this story is because we've seen President Trump over now two terms in office and six years almost, take a wrecking ball to government. And sometimes it's hard to explain that to say, well, you know, he took apart the Department of Agriculture or he got rid of these federal teams. It's very easy to understand what President Trump is doing to the White House. It is visible. And for many Americans, including a lot of Republicans, even those who like President Trump, they don't like this. They're conservative in both politics, but also belief on what should happen to the federal government. And the White House is one of the most famous, and not the most famous, building in America. So for President Trump to start tearing it
6:28 Speaker 03 down, and as he did last year, tear part of it down in basically three days, that was shocking, continues to be shocking.
6:35 Speaker 02 What was the East Wing? When was it built and what was in it?
6:40 Speaker 03 Historically was the annex of the White House that was less high profile than say the West Wing where the president's offices are where his aides are. The East Wing is where the first lady's offices were. There was also a movie theater there. There were some other kind of entertaining spaces. It wasn't the flashiest part of the White House. It was the appendix. It did have this emergency presidential bunker underneath, which is still, as far as we know, still there, like very, very deep under the ground. But it is not, or was not, what President Trump wants to do, which is to have this much larger, not just ballroom, not just offices, but this large military complex as well. That would be sprawling under where the East Wing used to be. But it was still a core part of the White House.
7:23 Speaker 03 If you were looking dead on at the building, it was the other side, the balancing side to the West Wing. And now it is just a big hole in the ground.
7:33 Speaker 02 I think for a lot of people around the world, we imagine the White House in the way that it's portrayed in movies and in TV shows as a vast military complex. We think of it having secret tunnels and giant Situation Room complexes. Is that accurate or is it a bit more low key than that at the moment? And is that part of what they're trying to build underneath the East Wing?
7:58 Speaker 03 So I will say that I'm incredibly lucky that I get to go for my job to the White House regularly. And as part of that, I have huge appreciation for it. But it also means that it is just a building to me and I can see all the problems, including the fact that it is old and small in ways that don't always come across on television. The press briefing room where we spend a lot of our time, it's pretty cramped in there. I mean, if you're, if you're in there with a bunch of other reporters, it can, it can be a pretty unpleasant place.
8:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, we've seen the reverse shot often, you know, from the podium backwards. It looks like you're all crammed in there like sardines. It seems quite small, yes.
8:33 Speaker 03 It's the world's most boring rock concert where it's standing room only. But if you go in the West Wing where staff have their offices, you can be in the offices of some of the most powerful people in American politics. They're really shabby offices. Elon Musk, he got a West Wing office and didn't like it. Because it was so cramped, he ended up relocating. The West Wing and the White House can be shabby. My understanding is that there is this Presidential Emergency Operations Center deep underground. I've never seen it. I'm not familiar with any reporters who've had a chance to go down there. Or if they have, they haven't been able to talk about it. It may well be fancy. It may well be that out of a movie scene. But I do know that there are people who don't love Trump and acknowledge the White
9:17 Speaker 03 House is tight and small and making some renovations and expansions is not the worst thing in the world. They just don't like the way Trump is doing it.
9:25 Speaker 02 Initially, it was $200 million was the announcement. I want to get to where that money is supposed to be coming from. But at what point did people sort of start to sniff the idea that maybe it might be a bit more than 200 million?
9:38 Speaker 03 I think some of this, Matt, has been we're dependent on the White House in many ways for what they want to release about this project. Now, reporters at The Post, reporters at some other outlets, we've been digging into this. But initially, we knew very little. The president didn't release full plans. We didn't have a full scope of what this project might be. But over time, President Trump has done two things, Matt. First, he has made the project bigger and bigger. Initially, it was going to seat some hundreds of people. Then it was going to seat, you know, up to 1,000 people. And if you look at the plans, it might actually seat even more than 1,000, given the space. And then President Trump has also raised the price tag. So it was 200 million, and it was up to 300 million. In recent estimates, he's said it might be $400 million.
10:22 Speaker 03 And that's not even getting into the cost of the military aspect of this project, too. And my colleagues at The Post had a great story last week that the total price tag, if you look at what the contractors' estimates have said, the private estimates that haven't been released to the public, this price tag would be $600 million.
10:39 Speaker 02 Who's going to pay that bill? Is it private donations? Is it just coming out of your taxes? What's going on?
10:45 Speaker 03 If you believe President Trump, this was going to be privately funded. And he has said that over and over again, continues to say that.
10:54 Speaker 03 This is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer. But a few months ago, it became clear that the White House wanted taxpayer money, too, that they were going to Congress hat in hand, saying, "We want about 200 million or 220 million for White House security upgrades." And these security upgrades would come in the form of the ballroom defenses. President Trump has talked about putting drones on top of the ballroom, having other defensive capabilities in the structure, and then underneath the ballroom as well. We know that it's going to go some layers down, maybe six, seven, eight layers down, with military offices and other military space. And that would come from taxpayers. There has been a recent effort to take some money that the Secret Service got, the Secret
11:39 Speaker 03 Service who keep the president safe here in the United States, to take some money that were allocated for, say, Secret Service training and repurpose it to White House security. There is indication that that security might just be President Trump's ballroom.
11:52 Speaker 02 I would have thought that recent events surrounding President Trump indicate that training the Secret Service is probably a pretty good idea. The building will now be significantly larger than the other parts of the White House. Is that right?
12:04 Speaker 03 That's correct. So the White House mansion, the classic main part of the White House, is about 55,000 square feet. The ballroom that Trump wants to build would be 90,000 square feet, nearly twice as big as the White House. And if you're looking at some of the renderings that the Trump administration has prepared, it really hits you. If you're walking in places on the street where you might have looked over and seen the White House, from many angles, you'll now see this big ballroom blocking the view of where the White House is. It will also destabilize the geometry of this symmetrical building, where before the east wing and the west wing were basically like kind of approximate in terms of size and impact, and now you're going to have this very big structure on one side towering
12:47 Speaker 03 over not just the mansion, but the west wing where the president's office is.
12:51 Speaker 02 Now, you spent the last week traveling with the president to the G7 meeting in France. On that trip, the president spent time at the Palace of Versailles, which is apparently where he signed the peace deal with the Iranians, which is kind of... Funny from a historical perspective. Do you think that he sees a parallel between palaces like Versailles and the White House? Does he see the White House as his palace?
13:16 Speaker 03 I think, Matt, the reason the president is so attached to this is who he is and who he was. He was a guy who built big buildings, ornate buildings. The White House is big, but not ornate. And President Trump wants to import his style to this classic building in America. So when he was offered the chance to stay a little longer in France, and Macron did this intentionally, the lure of Versailles was too much to pass up. He loves palaces, even dictators who have amazing palaces. That plays well with President Trump. He is someone who loves gold. He loves fancy columns, perhaps too fancy and too ornate. But that's who he is. And I do think, if not the White House, certainly something like Mar-a-Lago, has inspiration from Versailles.
14:01 Speaker 03 The ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, he has compared to part of the palace at Versailles. So we know that this matters to him and it is part of the rationale, I think, for what he's doing to Washington.
14:11 Speaker 02 As you say, it's difficult to get information out of this term. We do have a bit of insight into how some of his other projects are going. For example, his attempt to rename the Kennedy Center has led to pictures recently of his name being chiselled off the front of that building. Plus, there's the story of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. What can you tell us about what's going on with this pool?
14:34 Speaker 03 So the reflecting pool is the perfect Trump story. And what I mean by that, Matt, is it encapsulates so many of the things that we're talking about. President Trump in late April announced that he was renovating this signature pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I'm sure folks in Australia might even recognize it. It's such a visible part of Washington DC.
14:54 Speaker 02 Yes, we know it from Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech, the people standing around it and so many other big events, yes.
15:01 Speaker 03 Yes, I thought you were going to say Forrest Gump.
15:02 Speaker 02 Well, sure, yes, also that, yes.
15:05 Speaker 03 No, it's a very important place here in Washington. And President Trump wants very much that Washington will look as impressive as possible for July 4th. Which is coming up on the 250th anniversary of America's independence. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, for as impressive as it may look, it has had problems over the years. It has had numerous leaks. It sometimes smells because of the algae or other problems there. It's not a new issue that there have been problems at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. But President Trump announced in April, in kind of his signature style, not only was he going to fix the reflecting pool, he had already started fixing it. And it was going to be done within a week, maybe two weeks, cost less than $2 million. And he kept pulling out this number that President Biden, his predecessor,
15:50 Speaker 03 was going to spend maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. But President Trump was going to do it fast and cheap and well. He was even going to get his, like, swimming pool guy from his time of running, running clubs to fix the, you know, signature pool in Washington DC. So I wrote on this, maybe the next day or the day after, and preservationists were upset. They ended up bringing a lawsuit. But this project moved pretty quickly. It didn't move as quickly as President Trump said it would, but it was done within a couple of weeks. It cost more than he said it would, but it ended up costing $14 million, not hundreds of millions of dollars. And briefly, it looked like, okay, maybe this did work. The water looked clean. The reflection was effective. I was in the White House, Matt, before I went to the G7. So this might have been, you know, a week and a half, two weeks ago.
16:36 Speaker 03 And they were bragging about it. I talked to a pretty senior official who said, yeah, this is exactly what we want to do. This shows how Trump's strategy works, that if you wait for the government to sign off on all these things, you're losing time, but President Trump knows how to fix things. Well, Matt, now we know there's a reason for all those reviews. Because the president very much wanted to use American flag blue, he said, this dark blue color on the bottom of the basin of the water. But one reason that light colors were used is because a dark color collects heat and heated up this water. And the algae problem that was kind of bad before is now like supernova bad. It's horrible. There is algae everywhere.
17:19 Speaker 03 And this has become a laughing stock, not just here, but around the world. And there are teams Of federal workers down there constantly now trying to clean up the pool. They had been pouring hydrogen peroxide in the water. President Trump announced this weekend that they're going to drain the pool again. He's alleging that this is all sabotage and that's the reason why the algae has come back.
17:39 Speaker 02 Of course.
17:39 Speaker 03 Yes, of course, but there's no real evidence of that. I mean, maybe there are some people now who have made it a little bit of a scene, but this was President Trump's doing. As all these experts had said, this is why you don't rush ahead and make a change without actually talking to all the experts who might have been able to say, these are the things you need to do to pull this kind of project off in a way that doesn't set us back, which is now kind of where we are.
18:02 Speaker 02 Am I right in saying the paint is now flaking off? I've seen people picking up big sheets of the blue paint that seem to have come off the bottom of the pool.
18:11 Speaker 03 Absolutely. I mean, I haven't been down there, but my colleagues who have been have been updating me. I've gotten some tips from sources who've taken videos. The famous American flag blue is floating to the surface. And passerby's who might have reached in and grabbed a piece, they're now getting arrested and President Trump is saying, look, like, these are the people doing sabotage.
18:29 Speaker 02 Ah, they're the saboteurs.
18:31 Speaker 03 That's right, yes. The saboteur appears to be President Donald Trump. He's very happy to point the finger at other people.
18:38 Speaker 02 I've been thinking about this over the weekend, Dan, and Trump is now a guy whose DIY antics have now accidentally caused his pool to go green with algae in the middle of summer, and everybody's angry about it. In my view, he's never been more relatable to a suburban dad. I mean, when my pool goes green next year during the southern hemisphere's summer, I'm going to blame saboteurs, take a leaf out of Donald Trump's book. What does all of this construction say about how Donald Trump views his second presidency compared with his first term? Because in his first term, he both didn't do all these things, but he also spent a lot more of his time at Mar-a-Lago, quite famously.
19:21 Speaker 02 He spent it at his own properties. What does this tell you about how he sees this term as being different to his first?
19:28 Speaker 03 Well, there are a couple of things. I think first, his administration this time had a game plan in a way that his first Administration did not. He was famously surprised to win the election. And he was behind on putting together his team and his agenda. And that first year, there was a lot of flailing as some of the wrong choices were put in big jobs, as he tried to figure out how to work Washington. Infamously, he tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. That blew up in Republicans' face in a way that was very politically damaging. So this time, there was much more strategy in the four-year interregnum between administrations. And I think some of that was knowing how to get government to do what President Trump wanted it to do. And in this case, he cleared the decks on a number of different federal
20:14 Speaker 03 agencies and commissions that normally would have done the work of vetting his plans, putting up barriers to something like the ballroom. This time, those panels are filled with Trump allies, if not even lackeys. He's got his executive assistant on the Fine Arts Commission. This is a commission that historically had some of the most famous architects in America. Now it has his mid-20s executive assistant approving plans like the ballroom in the arch. So Donald Trump knew what he wanted to do this time, and he had people put in place to help that happen. I also think he's mad. He's in a different place himself. He is closer to the end. He knows that. He's conscious of his advancing age. He's 80 years old now. He's looking for ways to leave his mark, not just on policy and
20:59 Speaker 03 politics, but literally on Washington and the White House. So these projects, I think, mean a lot more to him. And finally, sometimes my colleagues and I joke, it is a little bit of a bucket list second term, where he does things like go to the Versailles Palace. He does things like go to the NBA Finals, the championship series, or the Super Bowl, or drive a lap, which I saw him do at Daytona 500 last year. He's doing all the things he wants to do in a way that I'm not sure we've ever seen a president really do. It's sort of like the world's biggest kid checking off all the things on his list.
21:32 Speaker 02 During his first term, he seemed a bit more attached to the idea of pretending like he was like other presidents, whereas it seems like he's shed all of that and he's just doing exactly what he wants to do this time without pretending.
21:47 Speaker 02 To be a conventional president of any kind.
21:49 Speaker 03 When I was a reporter covering the first Trump term, it was in some ways easier to get things out of the administration because there were so many different factions. It was like rival gangs. There was the Trump gang, a lot of people who hadn't been in government before. There was the Mike Pence gang. So Mike Pence's vice president had been around government and these were kind of more classic Republicans. There were people who had been holdovers. There were the independents who just kind of picked up. So you could kind of play these different groups off of each other and say, oh, I got this from the Pence people. What are the Trump people going to say? This time, Matt, the number one qualification has been not where did you go to school? You know, are you a general? It's are you loyal to Donald Trump?
22:28 Speaker 03 And that has led to the government of people who don't say no and people who affirm whatever he wants to do. And Trump says he's not like other presidents. He leans into it now. He is governing this time much less like a president and much more like an autocrat. His say goes and he steamrolls over Congress and any agency or any resistance that that might come.
22:50 Speaker 02 Dan, thank you so much for speaking to us about this. It's a wild time to be in Washington and I imagine a loud one too.
22:56 Speaker 03 It's only going to get louder because the Fourth of July is going to be the biggest fireworks event in history, President Trump says.
23:02 Speaker 02 Of course. Thanks for speaking to us today, Dan.
23:05 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
23:13 Speaker 02 Coming up on Thursday, the peace plan Donald Trump signed in Versailles has one very, very big asterisk over it. It relies on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon ending. Trouble is, the Israeli government doesn't seem that keen to end it.
23:31 Speaker 02 Why? That's coming up on Thursday. I'll catch you then.
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