Pod Insights If You're Listening What’s Under Trump’s Ballroom? About this episode Presidents have always left their mark on the White House. Harry Truman rebuilt it from the inside out. John F. Kennedy restored its elegance. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels… then Ronald Reagan removed them. By that standard, Donald Trump's plan to build a grand ballroom isn't all that unusual. In fact, it's something he's talked about for years. The real story isn't the renovation; it's the reaction.
After years of fuelling conspiracy theories about Washington elites and corruption, Trump has created an audience primed to question everything. So when he announces his biggest White House project yet, many of his own supporters assume there's far more to it. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps.
Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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0:09 Speaker 01 Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.
0:19 Speaker 02 Andy Burnham pitched himself as an outsider, not in that sort of populist way of saying, "I'm against the elites, but I'm from another part of the UK which perfectly well understands the cost of living crisis. Give me a chance to do this nationally."
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0:37 Speaker 03 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabakal and Gadigal people. When you imagine the White House, what do you picture? It's the big columns, right? The bit underneath the spaceship on the front cover of a DVD of Independence Day.
0:54 Speaker 04 Today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom.
1:00 Speaker 03 You know, the bit they show at the end of the title sequence of The West Wing.
1:07 Speaker 03 Well, there is a bit of an irony to that because that's not The West Wing at all. If you look at the White House from above, it's clearly three buildings connected by narrow colonnades.
1:23 Speaker 03 In the centre, the residence, the bit built in the early 19th century with the columns and the porticoes and the big windows. On each side, the wings, both built in the 20th century because the residence was too small to fit all the president's staff.
1:40 Speaker 03 Across the entire complex, there are 132 rooms, but the thing is, none of them are very big. Right now, the largest room in the White House is the East Room, which confusingly is not in the East Wing, it's in the residence. But when you see the president walking down that long corridor to make a big announcement like this.
2:03 Speaker 05 The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.
2:09 Speaker 03 He's making those big announcements in the East Room. If you listen carefully, you can hear the echo. It's a pretty big room.
2:17 Speaker 05 And a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
2:24 Speaker 03 It's used for everything from press conferences to musical performances. And while it is a big room, it's not that big. You can only seat about 200 people. Bigger events require a bigger space. And so during the Obama administration, they created that space by knocking up a big tent on the south lawn.
2:48 Speaker 03 Sitting at home in his private club in Florida, a certain property tycoon was horrified that fancy events such as state dinners were being held outdoors in a tent. He decided to try and do something about it.
3:07 Speaker 06 Recently, I saw that they were in a tent in the White House. I offered for nothing to build a $50 million ballroom because I said, you know what? When a foreign leader comes over, they shouldn't be in a tent. They should be in a ballroom.
3:21 Speaker 03 The person he talked to was senior Obama adviser David Axelrod.
3:25 Speaker 07 And he said, you know, I build ballrooms. I build the greatest ballrooms. You can come down to Florida and see them.
3:31 Speaker 03 Needless to say, the idea of allowing a reality TV host to build a new White House ballroom was a little bit too complicated for Axelrod to deal with at that particular point in time. So he left Trump on read.
3:44 Speaker 06 They never got back to me. It's a $100 million gift. They never got back to me. They should say, Trump's going to give us $100 million. He's going to build the ballroom. He's going to be magnificent. And why wouldn't they get back to me? That's the problem with this country.
3:56 Speaker 03 Well, 15 years after Donald Trump made that call, he's addressing the problem with the country and finally building the ballroom.
4:05 Speaker 06 You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back. You hear that sound? Oh, that's music to my ears. I love that sound. I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.
4:17 Speaker 03 Over the last few months, the east wing of the White House has been ripped down and an enormous area has been excavated to build not just a ballroom, but a security complex underneath.
4:28 Speaker 06 Donald Trump is eager to stress that no taxpayers' money is being spent on this project. He often says he's paying for it himself. In fact, a collection of wealthy donors have put up the funds, but we don't know who, we don't know how much. We don't know what they might get in return.
4:43 Speaker 03 Now, this ballroom project isn't popular. In fact, President Trump is suffering serious pushback from the public, with only 28% of Americans supporting what the media and Democrats are calling...
4:56 Speaker 05 Donald Trump's Ballroom Vanity Project. Trump's Vanity Project. Donald Trump's Vanity Ballroom. This is a billion dollars, and it's taxpayer money, and it's for a vanity project that no one needed.
5:12 Speaker 03 Now, I've got a slightly different take on this. I think the saga of the ballroom is, in fact, far more interesting than just a story about a building project. See, I think it would have actually been relatively easy to build this project back in 2010, when Trump first started campaigning for it. I think what's really happening here is that Trump is struggling to swallow his own medicine.
5:47 Speaker 03 Today, we're going to look at the extraordinary history of White House renovations, from giant mysterious holes in the ground to secret tunnels and bunkers, to the time one 20th-century president basically demolished the entire building. Everyone has decided this is Trump at his most unhinged, but I think it might actually be one of the more normal things that he's ever done. And that's exactly why it's blowing up in his face. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.
6:26 Speaker 06 I wondered if you would mind if I just hit a note of this piano so people could tell what the White House piano sounds like. I'll show them what it sounds like.
6:45 Speaker 03 This is President Harry Truman playing Mozart's Piano Concerto Number 11 on a piano in the East Room of the White House. Truman had become president in 1945, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died suddenly of a stroke. He had inherited a building that Roosevelt had spent his presidency quietly reshaping. Roosevelt made alterations to the West Wing and built the whole East Wing to cover up a bunker here, Doug, to protect the president from air attacks. But he'd left the residence, the original building with, you know, the columns, totally untouched. That was a bit of a problem for Harry Truman.
7:28 Speaker 03 Thank you very much. See, Truman loved playing the piano in the East Room. He would hold concerts there, where he would play alongside more accomplished pianists like Eugene List. And there's a story about one of the concerts by Eugene List that you've just got to hear.
7:46 Speaker 03 Harry's grandson Clifton told it at an event at the Truman Library.
7:50 Speaker 07 Mr. List gave a concert at the White House in the East Room, and during the concert, engineers came to my grandfather and told him that the 1,200-pound chandelier hanging over everybody's head was about to let go.
8:04 Speaker 03 See, it was a well-known fact around the White House in the late 40s that the residence wasn't in good shape. In fact, it was starting to fall apart.
8:13 Speaker 07 And grandpa had a choice to make, and he took what, for me, seems a rather risky choice for Harry Truman. And he let the concert go on, and they took the chandelier down the next day.
8:21 Speaker 03 Soon after this, according to Clifton Daniel, the weight of his mother's piano on the floor of the upstairs sitting room started causing the house to literally collapse.
8:32 Speaker 07 The leg of Mom's piano had gone through the floor. And it went through the floor above the family dining quarters and actually lowered the ceiling in the family dining room by a foot and a half. The floor just sort of caved in under the weight of the piano. And that was kind of the last straw.
8:53 Speaker 03 Truman moved the entire family out of the residence and into a nearby building reserved for VIP guests of the president. And then he ordered the entire interior of the White House residence to be demolished.
9:11 Speaker 03 The exterior walls of the residence were maintained, shored up by steel beams, but the entire interior was removed. Once all of the internal walls and floors were gone, the diggers came in, hollowing out a space under it for two new basement levels. Then the entire thing was rebuilt from the bottom basement up to the fourth floor.
9:36 Speaker 03 The family were out of the house for three years. But when they returned, Truman invited camera crews in for the first ever televised tour of the White House.
9:47 Speaker 06 And this point right here is where Mrs Truman and I stand when we have state receptions.
9:53 Speaker 03 He showed the news reporters through the ornate, beautiful and seemingly historical rooms.
9:59 Speaker 06 Mr President, might we take a look at the East Room now? Yes.
10:02 Speaker 03 He played Mozart on the East Room pianos.
10:10 Speaker 03 But none of it was real.
10:15 Speaker 03 Truman had kind of broken the seal here. He'd turned the White House into essentially a museum replica of itself. None of it was actually original anymore. So really, renovating the floor plan became a free-for-all for all future presidents.
10:34 Speaker 03 Kennedy built the Situation Room on the ground floor of the West Wing. Nixon tore out the indoor pool and replaced it with a bowling alley and the press briefing room. Carter put solar panels on the roof. Reagan ripped the solar panels back off the roof and dug a secret tunnel reportedly connecting the Oval Office toilet to the Roosevelt-built bunker under the East Wing.
11:00 Speaker 03 Throughout the 20th century, every single bit of the White House, except for the exterior walls, was built new or replaced. It's the White House of Theseus. President after president had poured millions of dollars into improving the security and functionality of the building. But one particular crisis proved that, after all that investment, the White House was still entirely inadequate.
11:32 Speaker 07 Panic in the very heart of US democracy, at the State Department, on Capitol Hill, the home of Congress, and outside the White House.
11:43 Speaker 03 On September 11th, 2001, Washington DC was in chaos following the terror attack on the Pentagon.
11:51 Speaker 07 Just after 9:30 on a warm autumn day, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 plunged out of a bright blue sky into the northwest corner of the giant five-sided building.
12:03 Speaker 03 President George W. Bush was in Florida at the time, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his office in the West Wing, discussing the situation at the World Trade Center in New York with his aides.
12:13 Speaker 06 And then, all of a sudden, the door burst open, and my lead Secret Service agent came in, and came over to the desk where I was sitting, and he said, "Sir, we have to leave immediately." Put one hand on the back of my belt, and one hand on my shoulder, literally propelled me out of my office.
12:32 Speaker 03 Cheney was propelled down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Centre, or POC, which was a fancy modern term for that bunker built by Franklin Roosevelt under the East Wing in 1942.
12:45 Speaker 07 Yeah, that is a fortified structure within the White House compound where we know the Vice President was when everyone else was evacuated from the premises earlier.
12:53 Speaker 03 The Secret Service genuinely thought that a plane was about to hit the White House and there was only room in the peacock for a couple dozen people. So they announced an emergency evacuation of the building to get everyone else out.
13:06 Speaker 06 The Secret Service, everybody had automatic weapons and they were yelling in bullhorns for the staffers to take off their shoes and run, there's another plane inbound.
13:14 Speaker 03 White House Dr Robert Darling was one of the people who made the cut for the bunker. So he was watching on as almost everyone else ran in terror.
13:24 Speaker 06 Seeing these young, professional young men and women who I dealt with on a daily basis, sprinting for their very lives to get off the White House complex to save their life was really a surreal moment for me.
13:38 Speaker 03 Now, for obvious reasons, no one knew if the peacock could withstand getting hit with a Boeing 757. It's not one of those things that you can easily test. But what everyone did know was that the bunker was woefully inadequate.
13:54 Speaker 03 Pipes hung from the ceiling, the communication systems were archaic. As more officials began to cram into the bunker to talk to Cheney, the air supply system began to struggle, CO2 levels began spiking, the room began to heat up. By the time President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush arrived, it was getting unpleasant.
14:16 Speaker 00 When we reached the peacock, I saw the outline of a military sergeant unfolding the ancient hideaway bed and putting on some sheets.
14:24 Speaker 03 She said the bed looked like it hadn't been updated since FDR's presidency. President Bush said he would be sleeping upstairs, thank you very much.
14:33 Speaker 00 He had said, you know, we're going to sleep upstairs in the bedroom, but if you need to, come get us.
14:38 Speaker 03 It's unclear how deep this bunker was, that kind of thing is classified. But it's clearly not that deep. On 9/11, nobody who went to the peacock even used a lift. But perhaps the biggest problem with the peacock's design was if the White House was actually hit by a plane, there was no way out, no escape tunnel. The Army Corps of Engineers at a nearby military base were put on alert in case they needed to come and dig White House officials out from the rubble-covered bunker.
15:13 Speaker 03 Chaney emerged from the experience convinced that something needed to be done. The facility wasn't up to scratch. A week later, the US Congress approved a law that transferred $40 billion to an emergency response fund, which the White House could spend on whatever it wanted, as long as it was connected to responding to, preparing for, or preventing terrorist attacks. A decade later, construction equipment arrived on the north lawn of the White House.
15:45 Speaker 05 It's an expanding zone of banging and digging, heavy equipment, earth moving and concrete pouring.
15:51 Speaker 03 Workers began excavating a massive area of lawn right between the White House press briefing room and where the TV reporters set up for their live shots.
16:01 Speaker 06 I don't take just one, two, but three steps to clear this eight-foot fence behind me, so you can see the White House when we do our stories.
16:10 Speaker 03 Reporters were understandably intrigued by what all this was about.
16:14 Speaker 05 Officials described this as an overdue upgrade of White House utilities, like water and sewer lines, electrical and other conduit, HVAC and storm drains.
16:23 Speaker 03 The scale of the work seemed to indicate that it might be a little more than a routine utility upgrade.
16:29 Speaker 06 There are lots of conspiracies, they're saying, come on, could this really be electrical? Is this really phones? Or is it a secret tunnel that they're digging?
16:36 Speaker 03 You know, all I'll tell you is, is you can imagine it is a very secure infrastructure project. That's, that's as much as I can say. The secrecy of the work was notable.
16:47 Speaker 05 They won't talk details. They've told workers not to talk either, even ordering subcontractors to keep their identities secret.
16:55 Speaker 03 Mark Smith from the Associated Press didn't believe the official story about this just being for utilities.
17:00 Speaker 05 What those of us who work here saw was tonnes of steel I-beams going in and truckload after truckload of concrete being poured into this big hole. Whatever was built goes multiple storeys, deep underground.
17:15 Speaker 03 See, the problem with building a secret underground facility to protect the president from attacks is... You have to do it secretly. Any information about any security facility could be used to identify a vulnerability. The depth, the thickness of the concrete, how the air and water supply works. The P O C has been under the east wing for 80 years and we still don't know how deep it is. We're still not entirely sure what that massive hole under the north lawn was all about. What we do know is that it was only part of what the government planned to do. At the time CNN interviewed project manager Bob Peck in 2011, he was described as
17:55 Speaker 01 overseeing the massive makeover of the east and west wings.
17:58 Speaker 03 The hole under the west wing reportedly only cost $86 million out of a reported total of $376 million. But despite this, through 2011 and 2012, there wasn't all that much pushback from the media or public about what exactly was happening with this very costly underground work, apart from this line of questioning from CNN to the project manager Bob Peck. Some would say, really? Why would you spend that kind of money simply on a makeover for the White House?
18:30 Speaker 06 And there's so many folks who are not doing well. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to have a building that's a sort of the image of the free world standing up there and not functioning well.
18:41 Speaker 03 And most Americans seemed to agree, or at least didn't care. And that's because this was all happening during what we like to call on this show the normal times, before the collapse of traditional norms, verifiable facts and rational decisions drove us into the jungle times we're living in now. This story about the enormous amount of work going on under the north lawn of the White House was kind of a last thing before the weather news story. It wasn't a massive deal. There wasn't much of a conspiracy theory back then, but now everything's a conspiracy theory.
19:21 Speaker 03 Donald Trump didn't start the process of destroying faith in institutions, but he was the piano whose weight cracked through the rotten floor.
19:31 Speaker 06 We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.
19:38 Speaker 03 Trump's lies tend to be about creating holes that he can fill with misinformation. When he says something like, Why doesn't he show his birth certificate? He's creating a hole in the public record which needs to be filled. He has done this for years.
19:55 Speaker 06 She deleted thirty-three thousand emails to keep them out of the hands of the authorities and the American public.
20:05 Speaker 03 And every one of those holes, he fills up with allegations of corruption.
20:11 Speaker 06 She went to great lengths to hide, delete, destroy, and lie about the evidence.
20:19 Speaker 03 Trump says that nobody can be trusted and spent years pushing the idea that Washington was nothing but a swamp of bureaucrats that needed to be drained.
20:29 Speaker 06 Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.
20:39 Speaker 03 But when he was elected, there was no way to turn this distrust off. And it turns out, deep endemic mistrust in the government can be a challenge when you are the one running the government.
20:52 Speaker 06 People across America are wondering, scratching their heads and asking, what the hell is Donald Trump hiding? What is Donald Trump hiding?
21:00 Speaker 03 What are you hiding? Of course, Trump didn't help the situation when he was so unwilling to answer questions about his own affairs. When the FBI tried to look into his dealings with Russia, he fired the FBI director. When people asked to look at his tax returns, he wouldn't release them. When people demanded that he release information about his former best friend Jeffrey Epstein, he tried his best to keep that information hidden.
21:26 Speaker 06 I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. Really, only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going.
21:36 Speaker 03 Trump's habit of constantly making accusations against others while keeping secrets about himself makes everything he does seem suspect. The world is now full of metaphorical holes which are increasingly filled with nonsense, which brings us to the actual hole Trump is creating on the grounds of the White House.
21:59 Speaker 03 When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, all of the structural and security problems we've been talking about with the building were still there. Most of the $376 million worth of work that needed to be done to the White House in the Obama era had not been completed. The bunker underneath the East Wing still hadn't been updated. It may still have that fold-out bed that George and Laura Bush would rather die than sleep in. And it still didn't have that ballroom Trump called David Axelrod about back in 2011. So Donald Trump decided to do something about it.
22:35 Speaker 06 They've wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there's never been a president that was good at ballrooms. I'm really good. I'm good at building things and we'll get it built quickly and on time. It'll be beautiful, top of the line.
22:48 Speaker 03 Now, most of the attention has understandably been on the plans for the ballroom and the fact that he has demolished the East Wing to make way for it. Various organisations have tried to stop him from doing this by launching legal challenges. In March 2026, one of those legal challenges led the White House to claim that halting construction on the ballroom would have significant national security implications. Trump, annoyed by the lawsuit, then went out to the media and explained exactly what was really going on here.
23:22 Speaker 06 Now, the military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed. But the military is building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that's under construction.
23:39 Speaker 03 See, that changes things a bit.
23:42 Speaker 06 And the ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what's being built under the military, including from drones and including from any other thing.
23:51 Speaker 03 Back in the normal times, I can imagine a situation that would go something like this. The President of the United States announces that the East Wing of the White House is being demolished to make way for a large complex with national security features. And then, once that's done, the President says that he and some of his rich friends will fund the rebuilding of the East Wing to include a large ballroom capable of hosting events that can't fit into the East Room. The details of the underground facility are classified, of course, but they are connected to a long-term project to upgrade the security of the White House. And I can imagine a situation where most Americans would accept that explanation
24:35 Speaker 03 in the normal times, not in the jungle times. Now, nobody believes what the president says. Most people seem to hate the ballroom, seeing it as an extravagance, a vanity project. It is driving an unpopular president's popularity even lower. But I think that the whole idea isn't as horrifying as some of his critics are saying it is. In fact, I think there's far more concerning things that we should be paying more attention to. Things that Donald Trump isn't hiding under a ballroom. Things that he's doing right out in the open. And that story's next on If You're Listening.
25:24 Speaker 03 If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd. Next episode, I'm going to be chatting to the former US Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz. He was one of the key architects of the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration. He was in the room when much of the deal was negotiated. And he's got a lot of interesting thoughts about how the negotiation process is going for the Trump deal that is set to replace the one he negotiated. You'll be able to hear my conversation with him on Tuesday. I'll catch you then.
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