Ballroom Blitz

The Big Beautiful Ballroom vs. the Obama Library

The Left can’t meme. They can’t do funny stand-up comedy. They’re not prayerful people. They’re not physically fit. And now we find out they can’t do construction, either.

The Big Beautiful Ballroom

Donald Trump is building a new Big Beautiful Ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood. He’s building it in the Neoclassical architectural style that characterizes the nation’s capital, since Conservatives like to conserve what works. Conservatives like to promote beauty rather than destroy things. Now before you mourn the fact that the East Wing is gone (oh, the humanity) let me remind me:

• The East Wing as we used to know it dates back only to 1942, making it just 83 years old. That’s not old for an “historical” building. In fact, the East Wing wasn’t even built when Nancy Pelosi was born. The East Wing was built the year Harrison Ford was born. The East Wing was built when Jerry Garcia was born. It’s hardly the Pyramids and doesn’t deserve the reverence of being an ancient site

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat) built the East Wing in 1942

• Actually, Roosevelt was mostly building an underground bomb shelter. It was World War II, after all. The two-story building above the bomb shelter was mainly built to hide the bomb shelter

Now the original East Wing was built by the other Roosevelt, Teddy, in 1902 but it was mainly a super-duper carport-type structure so that important guests arriving by horse-drawn carriages could pull up under a shelter and, with great dignity, step down from their carriages to participate in White House festivities. Even back in 1902, Teddy took some abuse for his “wasteful” spending in building such an ornate structure. Teddy Roosevelt (hardly a frou-frou kind of guy) survived the criticisms. It was Franklin Roosevelt who built the bomb shelter and the East Wing we know today. The East Wing was mainly built to allow for a bomb shelter and the upper structures provided some much-needed office space for the First Lady and various staffers.

The Bunker

The real point of the East Wing is the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a bomb shelter to keep the President, his family, and staff safe even in the event of a direct nuclear bomb hit. This bunker also houses a communications center so that the President can interact with those not fortunate enough to be in the bomb shelter.

From time to time, the PEOC has been utilized. For example, it was used on September 11, 2001, and Trump was sent there by the Secret Service during the 2020 BLM/George Floyd riots. You remember, those “mostly peaceful” riots for which virtually no one was ever arrested.

The PEOC has not undergone any serious upgrades, except for those improvements that could be made on the sly. Taking down the East Wing and replacing it with a ballroom is a great opportunity to upgrade the PEOC without arousing much suspicion. Enemies would no doubt like to know what we’re doing, but as long as we have Democrats screaming that ballrooms are evidence Trump is a Nazi, we can be sure little news attention will be devoted to the PEOC. (By the way, I saw “proof” Trump was a Nazi when liberals on social media pointed out that Hitler, too, had built a ballroom for the Chancellery. I think this is a jump-the-shark Democrat talking point.)

There are some myths about this ballroom:

• Trump does not need permission to do renovations; they are commonly done by presidents, although Trump’s improvements are, well, more Trumpian. Obama built a basketball court. Trump is adding an iconic new building to the White House complex that will likely be used and visited by world leaders for generations

• The Big Beautiful Ballroom is put in service to the country; it’s not Trump’s private playground. Private playgrounds were built by other Presidents, like John F. Kennedy who put in an indoor swimming pool for his lunchtime “swims,” and the aforementioned Obama who built a basketball court

• The ballroom is not taking food out of hungry kids’ mouths. That’s the Democrats prolonging the shutdown to “leverage” their political power by inflicting misery on children. The ballroom is being funded by donations and costs taxpayers exactly zero

• Total cost seems to be in the neighborhood of $350M; initial estimates were lower. But since we taxpayers aren’t footing the bill, this point seems like weak tea

• The Big Beautiful Ballroom will allow the United States to host large events without having to put up tents on the White House lawn and ask guests to tromp around on soggy grass. It’s an upgrade

• The White House has needed a facility like this for ages. In fact, back in 2010, Trump offered to build such a ballroom for Barack Obama, but Obama refused

• Trump did not trash the treasures of the East Wing. All of the historical artifacts contained in the East Wing have been taken by national archivists for cataloging and preservation

• The story of Trump “taking down Michelle Obama’s portrait” is not a horror story; Trump did not throw the portrait in the dumpster. In order to preserve it as an historical artifact, it was taken down and will be archived

• The architecture and design of the building with support the neoclassical style of the nation’s capital

• Some bemoan that we taxpayers or some Congressional committee didn’t get to consult or approve this new ballroom, but that’s how Trump gets things done; he doesn’t get bogged down in asking a lot of stupid bureaucrats their opinions

Some lefty rags are hailing the East Wing as “something precious.” These are the same people who championed the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots and razing of entire American cities and the toppling of much older and far more historic statues of national heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Why are centuries-old statutes of American founding fathers less precious than an annex to the White House built less than 90 years ago?

Cry me a river.

The Obama Presidential Library

There is an Office of Presidential Libraries in Washington which is part of the NARA. The Office administers 16 presidential libraries in the country. Most presidenital libraries are not libraries in the sense of lending libraries, but rather repositories of official documents. Not so with Baracks’ boondoogle. It’s private. Why?

Possibly the ugliest building ever erected in the United States, the Obama Presidential Library, is clearly the work of Democrats.

• Construction was scheduled to start in 2018 with the library completed by 2021. It still hasn’t opened. In fact, construction hadn’t even started until 2021

• Right now, they say the Obama Presidential Library will be open in Spring 2026. Yeah, and if you like your doctor, you can keep him

• Although universities, such as Columbia in New York, and the University of Hawaii, offered to be the site of this presidential library, Obama snagged up some prime Jackson Park real estate in Chicago and displaced a lot of South Side African-Americans who had lived in the area for generations

• I don’t know where Obama was born, but he sure wasn’t born in Chicago. He barely even lived there—maybe a few years. Making Chicago the home of his library seems like pandering to the Chicago political machine

• The land Obama wanted for his gray monstrosity wasn’t in private hands; it was public land and the site of Jackson Park, a public park established in 1893—and much older than the “historic” East Wing—that could not be sold

• Obama finagled a deal where a “private organization” acquired a 99-year lease on this public land and then Obama used it for his library. Obama had no sympathy for the kids who used to play in that historic inner-city park

• So outraged were some in Chicago against this hideous library, that in 2021, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court—which, sadly, failed to block the construction of the Obama concrete silo on public park land

• Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the aldermen of Chicago made sure that affordable housing was put in close proximity to the library, assuring lots of low-income housing projects adjacent to the library. This likewise changes the composition and demographics of this old Chicago neighborhood

• The location of the Obama library helps solidify Obama’s fake self-portrait as a native son of Chicago. I ate a deep dish pizza once—that makes me more Chicagoan than Obama ever will be

• Original cost estimates for the gray menace (back in 2018) were $300M or thereabouts with an endowment of $1.8B needed to keep the organization going (that’s about what Kamala needed to lose the presidential election in 107 days). Who’s paying? Donors are listed on the library website but not the amounts they gave

• At the end of September 2025, an Obama Foundation spokeswoman said the costs to build the library are now $850M. That’s almost triple the original estimate

• Chicago and Illinois taxpayers are not on the hook for the building—but they will be paying for “infrastructure costs” of this little vanity project

• The site has been plagued with lawsuits by and against various contractors. There were quality issues with the cement and cost/deadline overruns

• The Obama library will have a sports facility, meeting rooms, and house a branch of the Chicago public library—these are not the normal things of a presidential library

• There is an agency in Washington called the Office of Presidential Libraries, which is part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The Office administers 15 presidential libraries in the country. Barack is building #16. Most presidential libraries are not libraries in the sense of lending libraries, but rather repositories of official documents. Not so with Baracks’ boondoggle. It’s going to be private. Why?

• Obama is not going to put his Presidential papers in the library; he is going to have those papers digitized. He claims it’s to be modern, and he claims the digital records will be housed in the library. But we all know you can tamper with digital records much more easily than you can with ink on paper

• What happens to the actual paper records of the Obama presidency?

• The materials and everything in the library is owned privately and is not part of our national archives or under the watchful administrative eyes of NARA. Americans will have as much access to Obama’s presidential documents as we do to his academic records, passport records, social security records, and birth certificate

The Obama library is the ugliest building in America, possibly in the world. It’s 225 feet of tall, grim, gray concrete and resembles a “tower of terror.” It looks more like a prison than a library or museum. It’s been compared to sci-fi movie fortresses and a house where Darth Vader might live. It was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and it definitely does not fit in with the nearby buildings and houses in Chicago. Or any buildings in Chicago. Or any buildings on earth.

Defenders of the aesthetics of the building, if there are any, just say beauty is subjective. No, it’s not. We all know that certain things are aesthetically pleasing and certain things are ugly. A giant port-a-potty is not a beautiful thing, not that this is a port-a-potty. A port-a-potty has some redeeming utilitarian functions. This place has nothing like that. It’s ugliness for the sake of ugliness; it’s destruction for the sake of destruction.

Aesthetics are objective. A bucket of maggots is not as delightful to look at as a vase of roses in bloom. There are objective standards to beauty, even if we do not all share the same taste. Taste is whether you want those roses to be red or white or yellow or some combinations. Aesthetics is preferring roses to maggots.

Oh, and the concrete work is already cracking. Chicago has brutal weather and the stress of freezes and thaws on this tube of concrete is going to be a safety hazard.

Yet Democrats aren’t protesting the Obama Library—its outrageous lease of public park land to a private entity, its huge cost overruns and building delays, the destruction of an historic Black neighborhood, the shady tactics to procure a privately held 99-year lease of public land, and the fact that it adds the singularly most hideous building in the history of ever to Chicago. Doesn’t Chicago have enough problems already?

Finding Common Ground

But there is one thing that the Obama Library and the Big Beautiful Ballroom have in common. No books.