Trump’s Ugly Ballroom Project Somehow Gets Even More Expensive

The price tag on the White House ballroom just keeps climbing.

Speaking at a Hanukkah reception at the White House Tuesday night, Donald Trump nonchalantly dropped that the cost of building the 90,000-square-foot dance pad had grown to $400 million.

“I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “Who else but in our country would sue to stop a $400 million beautiful ballroom that people have been after for the White House?

“The White House has wanted a ballroom for 150 years,” he added.

But exactly who has been clamoring for the facility—which will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion—is not clear. Even the architect of the project, James McCrery II, disagreed with the size and scope of Trump’s ginormous ballroom, claiming that its construction would violate basic architectural principles. But McCrery’s opinion eventually got him fired.

The project’s price tag has seemingly grown by 100 percent since Trump first pitched it in July. The original $200 million cost became $300 million in October, as soon as Trump started tearing into the White House East Wing. The historic wing has been completely razed in the process, despite the president’s initial promises to build the addition “near but not touching” the actual White House.

Since Trump’s other promises have fallen flat, there seems to be no guarantee that the cost of the development will actually be funded “100 percent” by Trump and “some friends” of his.

The White House suggested that the project would be paid for, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also pledged significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir.

Donald Trump bragged about one of his biggest donors, Miriam Adelson, donating $250 million to his campaign in 2024, at a White House Hanukkah event Tuesday night. Adelson then told the audience that Trump could run for a third term and whispered something in Trump’s ear. Trump smiled widely as he announced she’d offer him another $250 million.

Adelson, a staunch supporter of right-wing Israeli causes, said that a third term, which is unconstitutional, was possible for Trump with the help of disgraced attorney and Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz, who is implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“Miriam gave my campaign, indirectly and directly, 250 million, she was number one,” Trump told the crowd. “When somebody can give you 250 million, I think that we should give her the opportunity to say hello. And Miriam, make it quick, because 250 million is not what it used to be.”

Adelson then came to the stage and told the crowd about how she had recently “met Alan Dershowitz, and he said the legal thing about four more years.”

“And I say, Alan, I agree with you. So, we can do it. Think about it,” Adelson said. Trump pointed out that Dershowitz was in the crowd as the audience started to chant, “Four more years.”

The whole thing raises numerous issues, like the influence that rich donors have on the president and the open declaration of plans to flout the Constitution to keep Trump in office beyond 2028. Adelson’s money doesn’t come without strings, either: Just like in 2024, the billionaire widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson will likely push for the United States to recognize Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

Last year, Trump told pro-Israel donors including Adelson that he would set back the pro-Palestinian movement by “25 or 30 years,” and so far, it seems that at least Adelson is happy with the job Trump is doing. Meanwhile, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the last two years, including over 379 casualties two months after a ceasefire in Gaza was declared. But at least Trump will get paid to stay in office illegally, right?

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles may have just ruined any chance President Donald Trump had of reviving his administration’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

In a wildly candid interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday, Wiles admitted that Trump’s effort to go after James over flimsy charges of mortgage fraud was his “one retribution.” (He has arguably had far more than one.)

Wiles explained that she hadn’t felt compelled to warn Trump off of James because “she had a half a billion dollars of his money.”

If the Trump administration ever wanted to seek an indictment against James again, it’s more than likely that the opposing legal team would simply have to cite Wiles to get the case tossed out again.

The Justice Department has tried three times to indict James—unsuccessfully in each instance, including one failed attempt as recent as last week. The original indictment against James was dismissed last month when a judge ruled that the Trump administration had improperly appointed the lead attorney, who had no prosecutorial experience at all.

Wiles was quick to claim that many of her quotes were taken out of context, but she’s already been caught lying about what she did and did not say. Multiple members of Trumpworld have voiced support for Wiles in the face of supposedly fake news. Meanwhile, Trump actually confirmed Wiles’s own wild comment about him.

Minnesota Republican Representative Tom Emmer was asked directly if he agreed with President Trump’s assessment that the thousands of Somali residents he represents are “garbage.” He couldn’t give a straight answer. 

“Mr. Emmer, do you agree with President Trump that say[s] 5,000 Somali residents in your district in St. Cloud are garbage?” Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manríquez asked Emmer while he walked down a hallway. 

The Republican majority whip offered a weak, political nonanswer. 

“I think what President Trump has done is raise an issue that is something that we’ve been trying to raise for almost three years,” he replied. “The press refuse to cover things that are right in front of them—”

“Donald Trump said that the Somalis are garbage; that’s what I’m asking you about,” Manríquez replied. 

“If you could let me finish, I’d love to answer your question,” Emmer said. “But apparently you wanna have an argument.” 

“Well, it’s a yes or no.” 

“Maybe you can find someone else that you can have the argument with. ’Cause I’m tellin’ ya, not all Somalis are bad—”

“Thank you.” 

“Ninety percent of the … crimes that have been charged are from the Somali community, and there’s nothing wrong, and nothing racist, about calling out crime.” 

There is no evidence that 90 percent of the crimes in Emmer’s district are committed by Somalis. Perhaps Emmer was trying to pivot to the scandal in Minnesota, in which the state’s social services system was defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.

Trump did much more than just “call out crime.” He smeared an entire group of people simply based on their origin, something he’s made a career out of.  

“When you look at what [Minnesota Governor Walz has] done with Somalia, which is barely a country … they have no anything, they just run around killing each other,” Trump said earlier this month. “I hear [Somalians] ripped off that state for billions of dollars … I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody’ll say ‘Ooh that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ’em in our country.

“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.… When they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch? We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

Representative Ilhan Omar just called the Department of Homeland Security’s bluff after it denied that ICE agents had ever pulled over her son.

DHS claimed Tuesday that the agency had “absolutely ZERO record” of federal agents pulling over Omar’s son, after the Minnesota Democrat revealed over the weekend that her son had been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown targeting the Somali American community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.

“With no evidence, it is shameful that Congresswoman Omar would level accusations to demonize ICE as part of a PR stunt,” DHS said in a statement on X. The department denied that it had committed racial profiling, and said that federal law enforcement uses “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests.

But the Somali American congresswoman doubled down—and told DHS to bring receipts.  

“The congresswoman’s son and others were pulled over by ICE, racially profiled, and forced to prove their citizenship with a passport. ICE has long operated as a rogue agency beyond reform,” she said in a statement. “It’s no surprise that an agency known for disappearing people also can’t keep its records straight. ICE now claims it has records of all the stops, and our office would welcome the opportunity to review them.”

It’s pretty ironic that ICE would balk at claims that it engaged in racial profiling after it begged the Supreme Court to allow it to profile individuals based on race, ethnicity, and language in its efforts to detain immigrants. And of course, there are also plenty of well-documented reports of ICE and Border Patrol agents racially profiling people.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had illegally lowered the standard for making immigration arrests when it instituted a policy of “reasonable suspicion” instead of “probable cause.” The judge barred federal officers from making warrantless arrests unless the person was in the country illegally and a flight risk.

Donald Trump has totally embraced the eyebrow-raising label given to him by his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

In a sprawling interview Vanity Fair published Tuesday, Wiles described the president as having “an alcoholic’s personality.” Trump, in turn, apparently agrees with that assessment.

“No, she meant that I’m—you see, I don’t drink alcohol,” Trump told the New York Post later Tuesday, defending Wiles’s comments. The 79-year-old routinely toasts with Diet Coke and claims that he doesn’t touch liquor due to his older brother, Fred Trump, who struggled with alcoholism for years before he died from a heart attack in 1981.

“So everybody knows that—but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump continued.

“I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that—what’s the word? Not possessive—possessive and addictive-type personality,” he said. “Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.”

Trump reiterated his faith in Wiles’s ability as his chief of staff, and suggested that if there was any fault to be had for the shocking value judgment, it would be on the interviewer. Trump claimed the reporter was “very misguided” even as he admitted that he did not read the piece.

The wide-ranging profile on Wiles’s first year atop the Trump administration sent shock waves through the political establishment Tuesday, and offered many Americans their first intimate glimpse into the inner machinations of Trump’s White House. Over the course of “many on-the-record conversations,” several of which took place after church on Sundays, documentary filmmaker and author Chris Whipple depicted a Cabinet structure that could not exist without the “ice maiden”’s direction and her unparalleled knack for translating the president’s agenda.

But, since he didn’t read the piece, Trump had no idea about its contents.

“Yeah, deceived—and he didn’t have great access, a couple of very short interviews,” Trump told the Post. “And Susie generally doesn’t do interviews.”

“If anybody knows the interviewer, and if they know Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is a totally—it’s lost its way,” he said. “It’s also lost its readers, as you know. No, she’s fantastic.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is being sued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations after he signed an executive order last week labeling the civil rights group a “terrorist organization.” 

In a statement, CAIR litigation director Lena Masri said, “This is still America, where due process, free speech and other rights guaranteed by the Constitution matter.”

“We look forward to once again protecting the rights of all Americans—liberal and conservative, religious and secular—to engage in activism without fear of illegal government retaliation,” the statement read.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that DeSantis is violating the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment. In his executive order, DeSantis accused CAIR of being “founded by persons connected to the Muslim Brotherhood” and claimed that people associated with the organization have been convicted for “conspiring to provide” support for terrorist organizations. 

In the lawsuit CAIR wrote, “The Executive Order identifies no criminal charges or convictions, relies on no federal designation, and inaccurately invokes statutory authority. It rests on political rhetoric and imposes sweeping legal consequences on a domestic civil rights organization because of its viewpoints and advocacy.”

DeSantis’s order prohibits CAIR, a national organization with chapters in states across the country, from receiving contracts, employment, or funding from state agencies. When asked for comment, a DeSantis spokesperson directed Politico to DeSantis’s posts on X, including one where he said legislation was being drafted “to stop the creep of sharia law, and I hope that they codify these protections for Floridians against CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood in their legislation.”

DeSantis is following the example of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who declared CAIR a terrorist organization in November, only to be sued by the nonprofit a few days later. In both cases, the motives appear to be based on bigotry, with DeSantis’s order claiming that through its supposed Muslim Brotherhood connections, CAIR is seeking to establish “a world-wide Islamic caliphate.” 

CAIR is also being attacked for allegedly supporting Hamas, but the organization said in its lawsuit that it has condemned Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel as well as Hamas’s other attacks. The use of the term “sharia law” evokes a conspiracy that right-wing groups have pushed for decades, claiming that Muslims are trying to set up a religious legal system. 

The sharia conspiracies have been repeatedly debunked, and laws targeting sharia and Islamic practices have repeatedly failed in court. CAIR’s lawsuits seem to have the Constitution behind them, especially since CAIR is not a proselytizing organization, but one working toward civil rights. Right-wing politicians and their allies in the courts will try to say otherwise and scapegoat the estimated 4.5 million Muslims in the United States.  

New York Representative Elise Stefanik is trying to completely erase her history with the New York Young Republican Club after they invited racists and German white supremacists to their annual party.

It became clear on Saturday that the club was willing to welcome even the fringiest members of the far right when white nationalists and Nazi slogan–chanting far-right German leaders attended the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala.

In the days since, Stefanik—who “formally joined” the group in 2022, per a club announcement—has claimed that she was never affiliated with the group to begin with, according to Politico’s Jason Beeferman.

But that’s just not true. The club’s website listed Stefanik’s name on its member page as of October, though it no longer appears to. It is unclear when her name was removed from the site.

She’s also supported the Young Republican cohort financially. In an August 2021 post, the official New York Young Republican Club X account thanked Stefanik for being a “generous donor to our Clubhouse Fund,” referring to her as a “staunch supporter of the NYYRC’s activism.”

Even the people around her have profound ties to the organization, including her longtime senior adviser, Alex deGrasse, who wrote on X in 2021 that he was a “a proud member” of the club.

The convenient rebrand could be the result of Stefanik’s political ambitions: The 41-year-old Albany native is vying to become the state’s first Republican governor in two decades. Peeling away from the club’s beliefs could make her more palatable to the large liberal population in New York City required to win the gubernatorial race.

Albany’s current leadership—and Stefanik’s 2026 Democratic opponent—was unimpressed with the effort.

“This is not the first time Stefanik has been caught palling around with hateful antisemites, and it won’t be the last,” Kathy Hochul campaign spokesperson Ryan Radulovacki told The New Republic.

Stefanik was also affiliated with another youth Republican group bearing a strikingly similar name—the New York State Young Republican Club—which made national headlines in October when leaked screenshots from a private group chat revealed the race-based vitriol among its top members. In it, Young Republican leaders referred to Black people as monkeys and joked about rape, slavery, and the gas chamber.*

* This piece originally misstated which organization had the leaked group chat.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have been caught lying about her statements regarding Elon Musk’s ketamine use, leading us to question everything else she denies from her series of interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple.

“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” Wiles told Whipple, in part one of the article. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”

While Musk’s drug use has been previously reported on, Musk had only admitted to casual and infrequent use of ketamine specifically. Wiles’s comments blow that notion up entirely.

Wiles, of course, profusely denied that she said this.

“That’s ridiculous,” she told The New York Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”

But Whipple’s reporting comes from a series of sit-downs that Wiles did with him, and The New York Times confirmed that Whipple played them a recording in which the White House chief of staff is heard making the ketamine comment.

This interview was a disaster for Wiles. She inexplicably gave Vanity Fair—and the general public—even more fodder against an already tumultuous administration. She said that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, and that Vice President JD Vance was a conspiracy theorist, among other things. And it seems that Whipple has solid ground to stand on, given his recordings of her, no matter how much she and her administration deny it.

The Trump administration is trying to claim that the FBI believed it didn’t have probable cause to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, citing a Fox News article claiming to have declassified emails. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted the article on X Tuesday, calling it a “story that matters.” The article claims that the FBI was hesitant to search the estate of the then-former president for missing classified documents, but was pushed by the Department of Justice at the time. 

One email reportedly states that at one point, the FBI’s Washington Field Office did “not believe (and has articulated to [DOJ]), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.” Another email states that the bureau thought a raid would be “counterproductive,” suggesting “alternative, less intrusive and likelier quicker options for resolution” to recover the documents at the heart of the case.

It’s not surprising that the White House would want to highlight this article, because it makes the Biden administration look like it was pushing for a raid over the objections of federal law enforcement. But the search of Mar-a-Lago, which a federal judge signed a warrant for, ultimately undermines that argument. 

Classified documents were found all over the estate, including in the ballroom, bathroom and shower, an office, Trump’s bedroom, and a storage room, according to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. Agents allegedly found documents from seven government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and State Department. 

The August 2022 search recovered 102 documents, including 17 classified as “Top Secret,” 54 as “Secret,” and 31 as “Confidential.” The indictment at the time quotes one of Trump’s attorneys saying that Trump allegedly said, “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t,” and, “What happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” 

One of Trump’s own lawyers specifically brought on to handle the classified documents case, Evan Corcoran, quit his job while the case was still ongoing in April last year. Trump and his aides allegedly misled Corcoran and encouraged him to lie to the DOJ. 

All of this may have been damning for Trump had the case actually gone to trial instead of being repeatedly undermined by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, who ultimately dismissed the case in July 2024 on the spurious grounds that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Following Trump’s election victory, Smith moved to have the case dismissed without prejudice, meaning it can be reopened once Trump leaves office in 2029. 

That might be why the Trump administration is trying to undermine what at one point seemed like the clearest case of Trump breaking the law. Trump not only wants to escape justice, but also wants anyone who prosecuted him punished and his record completely clean. Unfortunately for Trump, the evidence against him is well-documented, no matter how much he wants to whine about it.