My Grim Prediction For How Trump’s SCOTUS Goons Will Rule on His Ballroom

What will SCOTUS do—and will they interrupt their summer vacation to do it? Well, it should only need be a quick break from the beach, or whatever megadonor’s mansion they’re holed up at: The court should of course decline to hear Trump’s over-the-top emergency plea for a ballroom-meets-military complex. The justices should let lower court rulings stand—that congressional approval is needed before ballroom construction can continue.

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But they won’t. Not this Court, not with three Trump-appointed judges, and Alito and Thomas making five, at bare minimum. They will likely contort themselves to allow construction to continue, buying the administration’s argument that the lavish venue is actually protective cover for a military bunker below (and a drone platform above)—or at least pretending to buy it.

Or they could extend the deadline for congressional approval. The latest lower court ruling gives Trump until August 21, this Friday, to secure lawmakers’ blessing. But that’s not happening. Congress is back home on recess, and even if they were in town, nobody is keen on the ballroom, not even Republicans.

Trump is seeking permission from SCOTUS to continue construction while he appeals that ruling. He’s gambling that he can get it done before he’s told he can’t. It’s the Trump way—ask for forgiveness, not permission. In fact, don’t even ask for forgiveness. The odds of the president getting what he wants went up when the administration invoked national security, citing multiple attempts on Trump’s life. Of course, these had nothing to do with the White House, which was already well fortified with a bunker under the now demolished East Wing.

In a full-court press on SCOTUS, the FBI, CIA, and the Secret Service all weighed in. Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll told SCOTUS in his testimony that the ballroom, which will be as high as the White House itself, has been designed to create a “critical air gap known as standoff or ‘attic depth,” and any reduction in height will “fundamentally compromise mathematically validated blast-attenuation parameters and lead to catastrophic structural failure of the underlying node.”

Not the node!

And then there’s the matter of national pride. Secretary of State Marco Rubio regaled SCOTUS with tales of how he’s feted around the world in facilities that show off a country’s beauty and wealth. America, he groused, is making do with a tent on the lawn and unsanitary portable bathrooms for big events. To be clear, this is not new, and it has not been seen as a hardship to have a tent with wooden floors placed on the South Lawn. I attended two such events, one to celebrate the signing of the Camp David Accords, the other a State dinner honoring British leader Tony Blair during the Clinton administration.

Talking with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump invoked the Great Hall of China, which he visited during his recent trip to Beijing, and lamented that “we have nothing like that. He added that the ballroom is a “gift” from donors and won’t cost taxpayers anything.

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Except that the cost has escalated from $300 million to $600 million and more still; the anonymous donors are from the tech and crypto world, with ties to Trump’s family, and from other corporate interests like Amazon and Google that benefit from government contracts. Trump says he will release a list of donors “soon,” which means he has no intention of doing so ever.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a national nonprofit that Congress has entrusted to oversee historic buildings, filed its lawsuit last year after Trump began demolishing the East Wing without authorization from Congress. Trump called the group “loser Democrats and liberal donors,” but when they didn’t back off, he upped the ante, calling them “TREASONISTS” in a Truth Social post claiming they had disclosed top military secrets (which is not true).

The nonprofit subsequently called the lawsuit presented by Trump Solicitor General John Sauer “audacious,” and in a statement said, “The Administration’s transparent efforts to evade the rule of law, frustrate judicial review, and limit the availability of meaningful relief in the courts must stop here.”

“Audacious” is the right word as Trump circulated an AI-generated image of himself strolling with George Washington through the imagined ballroom, surveying the dining tables and thanking George “for some of your brilliant ideas.”

Just another day in the park with the 47^th president as he pushes his version of reality and we all respond as though there’s nothing to see here—or, perhaps, too much to see. Trump seems to relish criticism, treating it like fuel for further conflict.

This court has been mostly friendly to him, bestowing him in a single ruling last year unprecedented and unlimited immunity from virtually anything he does in the service of the presidency. They did check him on tariffs and will likely do that again; they just refused to overturn the five million dollar judgment he was ordered by a jury to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll in her sexual abuse and defamation case. That was an easy call.