Supreme Court Allows Trump to Move Forward With White House Ballroom

The Supreme Court is letting President Trump move forward with his expensive White House ballroom.

On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a stay in the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that would have halted work at 11:59 p.m. This means that for now, construction can resume while the high court gives a full review to the lower court’s ruling earlier this month that the ballroom is illegal due to a lack of congressional approval.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2–1 on August 7 that Congress has the “exclusive authority to regulate the construction and demolition of White House structures,” and since Trump began construction on his ballroom with congressional approval, it was against the law.

“At this preliminary stage, the National Trust [for Historic Preservation] has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House—the People’s House—to fit a particular President’s desires,” the ruling stated.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation initiated the legal challenge against Trump’s ballroom, on the grounds that he doesn’t have the authority for its construction, which has resulted in the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. The organization’s lawyers say that Trump is trying to “outrun the courts” by speeding up construction without waiting for judicial rulings.

Last year, Trump vowed that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” a promise that was quickly broken when the public saw pictures of the gutted White House. He claimed that it would only cost $200 million, only for that number to soar to $300 million and then $400 million after he added extra construction. Later, it emerged that taxpayers would be footing half of the bill for a $600 million project.

For now, Trump gets to keep building his unnecessary ballroom, and by the time the Supreme Court issues a final ruling, the American people could be stuck with it, whether it’s legal or not.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is trying to sue for defamation after yet another report found that the National Guard takeover of cities across America had no significant impact on violent crime levels.

In July, the Center for American Progress, or CAP, published a study analyzing the impact of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.

“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report noted. “There is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”

That scathing finding led Trump to threaten another defamation lawsuit, arguing that the report was false and malicious. Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, contacted CAP on Monday with the lawsuit threat, giving the liberal think tank until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the study and say sorry to Trump, The New York Times reported.

“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” Trump ranted earlier this month. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”

CAP President Neera Tanden called Trump’s allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight back.

“Silencing research that is inconvenient to government policy is anathema to free speech and the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “CAP will neither cower nor bend to this attack on independent research.”

A similar report from The Washington Post this month found that the crime numbers Trump so often touted in Washington, D.C.—an 88 to 92 percent decrease in crime and an 18 percent decrease in homicides—were due to a downward trend in crime that appeared long before the National Guard did.

This all of course means that American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for the National Guard to loiter in the streets of blue cities—in metro stops, in beautiful public parks, by Trader Joe’s— for nothing.

President Trump isn’t spending any campaign cash on close midterm election races, irking his fellow Republicans and putting contests like the Texas Senate seat in jeopardy. 

In July, Politico reports, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC didn’t spend any of its $400 million in the bank on Republican candidates, not even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who only narrowly won his state’s GOP Senate primary and faces surging Democrat James Talarico. 

Republican donors say that Trump needs to step up to keep the Lone Star State from sending its first Democrat to the Senate since 1993, considering that he endorsed scandal-ridden Paxton at the last minute over incumbent John Cornyn. That endorsement was probably the deciding factor in the close runoff election and now Paxton is polling just one point ahead of Talarico, unheard of in staunchly red Texas. 

“The message to Trumpworld is, ‘you broke it, now you own it. You gotta spend some of your money to defend him because we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’” one GOP donor told Politico. 

A second donor told the publication that “the general view is that’s Trump’s responsibility to bankroll, especially since Paxton took out one [of] the GOP Senate’s best fundraisers and is currently running a lackadaisical campaign.”  

These donors would prefer to spend their money on open Senate races in Michigan and North Carolina, kicking out Democrats like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and protecting vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents like Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. 

“There’s a lot of people that, one, don’t really like Paxton at all, they think he’d be a terrible senator or they were loyal to Cornyn—or both,” a third GOP donor said to Politico. “This is a situation that we didn’t need to spend this money at all. We need it in North Carolina, in Georgia. To make Texas a toss-up is just a foolish, foolish decision.” 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also staying out of Texas, preferring for now to spend its money on eight other races, making Trump’s unwillingness to open his coffers all the more glaring. While the NRSC plans to help set up a joint fundraising campaign with Paxton, any money above a certain amount would go back to the committee, according to Politico. 

Trump has not spent any of his campaign money on a candidate since March, and the candidates he endorses keep losing. He’s refusing to accept any blame for Republicans becoming more and more unpopular, either. It seems like he cares less about his party controlling Congress than he does about his own pet projects. 

President Trump is trying to take away the American Bar Association’s ability to accredit law schools due to its being too woke.

The ABA is the leading accreditor for almost 200 law schools in the United States. Without its accreditation, a school’s graduates may not qualify to take the bar exam, and the school itself may not qualify for federal funding—two massive implications. Now the Education Department has published a 500-page report recommending the removal of that long-standing power because it believes the ABA is trying to “inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said to The Wall Street Journal. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

The Education Department’s recommendation is not final and will take some months to be adjudicated, but the right is already celebrating.

“This will be one of the most meaningful changes to open doors for Americans and steer legal culture toward justice, not radical indoctrination,” former Trump adviser May Mailmain wrote on X. “The American Bar Association (ABA) is a left-wing advocacy group, filing 80% of its amicus briefs for liberal arguments and 0% for conservative. It uses its monopoly on recognizing which law schools are ‘accredited’ (get student loans) to force DEI hiring, recruitment, and inflate the cost of education.”

The right has railed against both the ABA and higher education in general for some time now. The Trump administration has ratcheted up those attacks, going after law firms that won’t capitulate and freezing university funding on DEI grounds. Accreditation is just another tool in this culture war—Trump even called it his “secret weapon.” It’s also worth pondering why the most corrupt president in history would want to cripple the law school education apparatus.

The ABA continues to maintain that it is operating well within the Education Department’s requirements.

“ABA presidents have issued 15 separate statements dealing with judicial independence, security and the integrity of the justice system in the U.S. in the past eight years. That’s Democratic and Republican administrations. And it’s not who we’re opposed to, it’s what we’re in support of,” ABA president William R. Bay told NPR back in 2025 when asked about accusations of liberal bias. “If we want America to be great, we must do the right thing every day. And that’s why we support the rule of law, the bedrock principles of our democracy. And that’s [why] we’re speaking once again for the rule of law, because there’s a clear pattern we see that would suggest it is under considerable duress.”

President Donald Trump is letting fraudsters off the hook at the expense of their victims, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee Friday.

The 25-page report found that Trump’s sweeping pardons had relieved white-collar criminals of $1.7 billion worth of fines, forfeitures, and restitution, in a “massive redistribution of wealth in favor of convicted criminals.” Democrats accused Trump of sidelining the traditional clemency structure to implement a pay-to-play system.

The report emphasized Trump’s pardon of Trevor Milton, former CEO of Nikola Corporation, who was convicted of fraud in 2022 for misleading investors. Milton had been sentenced to four years in prison, and the judge was scheduled to rule on a recommendation that he pay $700 million in restitution. Then Milton opened his wallet. The convicted fraudster and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to committees supporting Trump’s reelection. Milton was pardoned in March 2025.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Trump pardoned Adriana and Andres Camberos, relieving them of their $50 million in restitution to victims and $30 million in forfeiture. Trump stepped in on behalf of private equity executive David Gentile, commuting his seven-year prison sentence and scrubbing a $15.5 million forfeiture obligation. The president pardoned four executives from BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that violated anti-money laundering laws, and wiped away $130 million of the company’s federal fines. And many, many more.

Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. Last week, Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would destroy the government’s registry on shell-company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption. In addition to pardoning dozens of white-collar criminals, the Trump administration has eliminated the task forces on kleptocrats, paused the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutted the Foreign Agents Registration Act.