Trump’s Ballroom Highlights the Limits of Liberal Advocacy
Historic preservation groups responded to the White House East Wing's demolition with equivocal statements and "deep concern." Their failure to mobilize reveals how dependent liberal advocacy has become on the billionaires funding Trump's regime.
As Trump builds his ballroom, historic preservation groups issue tepid statements. The episode reveals a sad truth: liberal advocacy groups are too afraid of Trump-aligned billionaires to mount real resistance, and Trump knows it. (Aaron Schwartz / CNP / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The stunning, rapid demolition of the East Wing of the White House does not sound the death knell of the United States of America, despite the breathless pronouncements of some observers. But it is a bellwether for the exhaustion of liberal protest politics, as the interest groups many had hoped would fight Donald Trump’s agenda are instead cowering, too afraid of Trump-aligned billionaires to mount a genuine opposition.
Most of the East Wing now lies in a landfill, Trump is rejoicing in his edifice complex, and a host of preservation advocates are watching from the sidelines, hiding behind equivocal, last-minute press releases and “strongly worded” letters.
Trump’s audacious ballroom plan has thwarted any meaningful expert review that would have slowed down the dream of the would-be authoritarian grandee. The National Historic Preservation Act, enacted in 1966, specifically exempts the headquarters for the three branches of government — the White House, the Supreme Court Building, and the Capitol — from preservation review by the National Park Service under Section 107. Deference to executive power is embedded in the first comprehensive federal historic preservation law.
Nonetheless, recent presidents have often submitted White House changes to review by the National Capital Planning Commission and the US Commission on Fine Arts — although each would only have advisory review power. But Trump evidently does not even want to pretend to honor expert opinion.
Some historic preservationists have pointed to Executive Order 11593 (1971) as a boundary, as it directs the president to “provide leadership in preserving the historic and cultural environment of the nation.” If this boundary were really fixed, then they may want to review the cuts to National Park Service site and preservation staffing since Trump took office, as well as previous presidents’ campaigns to demolish historic public housing buildings, as in the case of Bill Clinton, to leave disaster-stricken historic cities without adequate federal recovery, as in the case of George W. Bush, and to reduce federal funding for historic district designation, as in the case of Barack Obama.
The litany of objectors trying to invoke a rule or precedent governing how a president should behave seem to be publicly disassociating. Previous presidents might have been swayed by allegations that they were breaking decorum and abusing executive authority in an attempt to alter the White House, which after all belongs to the people, not to the president. But Trump doesn’t care about those things. Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that all disapproval of the East Wing demolition amounts to “fake outrage” only underscores the administration’s unrepentant stance. Has anything that has happened since the inauguration suggested that raising the flag of supposed normalcy will influence or thwart Trump?
Unfortunately, Trump seems to be the one living in reality. He knows full well that the nation has failed to develop mass organized opposition to his administration’s policies and appropriation of legislative powers, and that his critics are stuck living in a bygone era. He’s well aware that there is no rule stopping him from doing whatever he wants, and no force with the political power to enforce such a rule if there were one.
Liberal Advocacy Groups’ Tepid Response
Trump first revealed his plans for the new ninety-thousand-square-foot, $200 million ballroom in July. While Trump declared that his renovation would respect the East Wing, early documents already suggested otherwise. Plus, the real estate developer turned president has a history of lying about his plans. Trump famously declared that he would preserve architectural friezes from the historic Manhattan Bonwit Teller building as he demolished it to build Trump Tower in 1979. Instead, he personally ordered them destroyed to save money.
Historic preservation groups should have seen this coming from a mile away. And maybe they did, but if so, they haven’t acted with much urgency to stop it, limiting themselves to wringing their hands as the project was already well underway.
Take the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the national advocate for historic preservation chartered by Congress in 1949. On October 21, the Trust issued a statement asserting:
We acknowledge the utility of a larger meeting space at the White House, but we are deeply concerned that the massing and height of the proposed new construction will overwhelm the White House itself — it is 55,000 square feet — and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House with its two smaller, and lower, East and West Wings.
We respectfully urge the Administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes, including consultation and review by the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, both of which have authority to review new construction at the White House, and to invite comments from the American people.
Note that the Trust does not express any actual opposition in this statement. The preservation lobby does endorse Trump’s idea that a ballroom is necessary, offers aesthetic criticism, and suggests that the demolition be paused while the president pursues “legally required” advisory reviews that would not actually stop the ballroom. If the Trust truly wanted to block the East Wing demolition, it could have mobilized its nearly three hundred thousand members after the July proposal and even considered filing a lawsuit to determine whether any reviews were being thwarted. Instead, we got a letter “respectfully urging” the president to do something he was obviously never going to do.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA), the national professional organization, did a bit better with its first “formal recommendation” for review on August 5. That recommendation, however, devotes some space to invoking federal preservation standards that are not actually mandated for the ballroom, rendering the whole enterprise somewhat toothless.
On October 24, the AIA issued a statement that, using much stronger language this time, condemned the demolition. Just one problem: the demolition had been completed the day prior. The statement read:
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) affirms with deep concern that the full demolition of the White House East Wing stands in direct contradiction to earlier public assurances that the project “will be near it, but not touching it and it will pay total respect to the existing building.”
“Deep concern” for the demolition of a building already pulverized to dust hardly counts as advocacy. Genuine advocates concern themselves with pursuing desirable outcomes, not merely stating their position for the record.
A better statement came from the Heritage Conservation Committee of the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) on October 16, admirably ahead of actual demolition. That statement calls for the adoption of a preservation plan for the White House, and avoids resting on calls for processes that are not binding or even realistic. That approach is commendable. Even so, the SAH statement presumes naively that there will be any real role for professional expertise in the Trump administration’s dominion over the White House. It seems to be reaching for a world that’s already gone, and which existed before only as a flimsy fiction.
Crucially, none of these groups did anything resembling politics. None of them mobilized their members against the administration’s plans, or joined broader coalition efforts to protest or litigate Trump’s authoritarianism, or otherwise showed any willingness to step into active resistance to this administration.
This pattern of acquiescence extends well beyond the ballroom fiasco. The National Trust for Historic Preservation was silent as Trump initially rolled back preservation jobs at the National Park Service under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts. For mainstream advocacy groups in architecture and beyond, compliance is the order of the day — making it safe to speculate that these groups knew their too-little-too-late lamentations over the White House East Wing would change nothing.
The Ballroom Billionaires
In attempting to understand architecture advocacy groups’ deference during this episode, we would be remiss to overlook the role of funding networks. The White House ballroom is both a real estate project and a sweetheart deal–making scheme. Trump is its public-facing frontman, but he is not the real money behind the project, nor even its sole beneficiary. This particular situation aligns with the broader pattern, where Trump’s egomaniacal antics create diversions that provide adequate cover for billionaires as they continue their historic consolidation of wealth.
Ballroom donors include the tech industry titans: Meta Platforms, Apple, Google, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard. Military contractor Lockheed Martin, which held $33.4 billion in federal contracts last year, donated $10 million. Another contributor was military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Comcast, owner of Trump-threatened NBC, pitched in. So did the Union Pacific Railroad, which is seeking a federal merger approval for its desired merger with Norfolk Southern. Donors already enmeshed in Trump’s world include the Adelson Family Foundation, convicted felon Stefan E. Brodie, and billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm. The Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, staunch supporters of the US-funded genocide in Gaza, are also on board. So is Stephen A. Schwartzman, principal of Blackstone, and the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of cryptocurrency giant Gemini.
The big money behind the ballroom is pretty transparently invested in long-term pay-to-play schemes with Trump’s government. And beyond the donors lie the real estate business interests: McCrery Architects is the designer, AECOM the engineer, and Clark Construction the general contractor. The organizations offering their last-minute rejections of the ballroom have long been the subject of criticism for catering to big-money clients, flashy “starchitects,” and wealthy benefactors. Like all of liberal advocacy, they are financially reliant on the largesse of fickle philanthropists. They’re not exactly eager to alienate Trump’s chosen industry insiders, much less his long list of ultrawealthy ballroom donors.
The nominal opposition to the ballroom pulls its punches because preservation and architectural advocacy remain too dependent on the power players supporting Trump’s project. We are witnessing the increasing irrelevance of expert-driven advocacy under this administration. The niceties expected by the National Trust and the AIA are a relic of the past. What we have now is a power struggle between an authoritarian regime and the public interest — and organizations that can’t commit to that fight are Trump’s best enablers. Their empty statements won’t deter this administration, no matter how deep their concerns are. The real power resides with the ballroom donors using Trump as the greatest diversion from accountability that ever existed.