The White House Ballroom Is Illegal and Must Be Torn Down

27 October 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Trump’s White House ballroom, which replaces the 25,000 square foot East Wing of offices by a single gigantic 90,000 square foot ballroom, is illegal and must therefore be taken down and the legally required procedures be adhered-to, which would certainly produce nothing like what Trump and his friends are now building there.

The requirements in U.S. federal law were written in order to prevent bribery — the offering or purchasing of public favors to private indivduals and corporations. Here are two of the most important of these laws:

1. “§ 2635.702 Use of public office for private gain.” Employees of the federal Government “may not use or permit the use of their Government position or title, or any authority associated with their public office, in a manner that is intended to coerce or induce another person, including a subordinate, to provide any benefit, financial or otherwise, to the employee.” The donors (see this and this) to Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project include numerous entities that are dependent upon the U.S. President’s favors, such as: Meta Platforms (Mark Zuckerberg). Apple, Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Google (Eric Schmidt), Lockheed Martin, Microsoft (Bill Gates), Comcast (including NBC), Altria (tobacco), Coinbase, Ripple, Tether, Palantir Technologies (Peter Thiel and Elon Musk), T-Mobile, Hard Rock (casinos), Union Pacific Railroad, Micron (computer chips), Caterpillar, Booz Allen Hamilton, HP, Nextra Energy, Reynolds (tobacco), The Adelson Family Foundation (the Zionist Miriam Adelson, who donated $106 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign), Stefan E.Brodie (who was indicted then convicted — a rarity in a corporate-conspiracy case — by a unanimous jury, of having committed a federal crime, but he persuaded the judge to acquit him — the judge then disagreed with the jurors and acquitted Brodie; the Government then appealed the case to the appellate court, which found the jurors’ verdict to have been entirely sound but ruled that Brodie will be free unless and until the Government retries the case; and, so, Brodie is now free, but may reasonably be presumed to be hoping that Trump’s prosecutors won’t retry the case against him), Betty Wold Johnson Foundation (a Trump-supporting ‘charity’), Charles and Marissa Casarillo (proponents of keeping financial technology unregulated), Edward and Shari Glazer (major donors to Trump), Harold Hamm (oil billionaire), Benjamín Leon Jr. (Trump’s appointee as U.S. Ambassador to Spain), The Lutnick Family (of Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick), Laura  and Isaac Perlmutter Foundation (Zionists), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone CEO), Konstantin Sokolov (energy investor), Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher (respectively former U.S. Senator, and the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange), Paolo Tiramani (real estate investor), Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (bitcoin investors), and J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul (the sugar-monopolists; Wikipedia says “they are known as the “first family of corporate welfare”.[5][6]”).

2. “Antideficiency Act” “This act prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services.”

Other federal laws could also be cited, such as the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, which are poorly written because the Founders couldn’t even imagine how the aristocracy’s bribery is being done today. The two laws that I have cited are the decisive ones here. They are clear, and they are damning against this President — NOT against his predecessors, who legitimately had the People’s House renovated. Trump is breaking precedent here. He is breaking the law here.

On October 21st, the White House headlined “White House Ballroom Continues Proud Presidential Legacy” and argued that this renovation is simply one of the many that have been done of the White House, and listed and described the many prior examples. However, none of them were being done illegally; none were being privately financed; none of them had been invitations to the corrupt to become further corrupted and the Government to be further privatized, at all. None of them were. Trump’s Administration does not cite the law in this matter; they ignore it, because they violate the law and because the ‘opposite Party’ in Congress allows this because the corruptness is on both sides of the aisle and none of the Congress-members wants to end their gravy-train of corrupt privileges.

Also on October 21st, the National Trust for Historic Preservation sent a letter to all of the federal agencies that federal law requires to approve a renovation to the White House before any major renovation is done to it, headlining “National Trust Letter Regarding Proposed Construction of the White House Ballroom”, which said, “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, and to invite comment from the public.” They were requesting all U.S. laws to be complied with in this matter.

If this isn’t an impeachable offense (not to say criminal offense), what is?

The phoniness of the political opposition to this was epitomized when the boilerplate ‘progressive’ in the U.S. Senate, Bernie Sanders, used this matter in order to advertize his new book Fight Oligarchy. Not to educate the public regarding this criminal offense by the U.S. President and his aristocracy (‘oligarchy’), against our democracy, but simply to further enrich himself. He, like the others, has the privilege of his position to do that this way.

Many recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have unleashed the present intense corruptness by the aristocracy against the public in America; but, in this prticular case, ANY authentic progressive who possesses the standing to bring a legal charge (ultimately criminal charges) against any and all of its participants, will at least attempt to do so; for, otherwise, there is no lower that the U.S. Government can possibly go than it now is going.

The U.S. Government shut-down started on October 1st, and Trump had announced the White House ballroom on July 31st, but the work on it didn’t start until after the Government-shutdown, so that the demolition of the East Wing didn’t start until October 21st, when Congress was already out-of-session and couldn’t be debating it; but, clearly, even congressional Democrats aren’t speaking publicly threatening to impeach remove and convict Trump and his co-conspirators in this federal crime against the public. Because that’s what it clearly IS.

On October 22nd, FactCheck dot org headlined “Trump’s White House Ballroom Sparks Questions About Funding and Ethics”, and yet this isn’t merely a matter of ‘ethics’ (that field of philosophical garbage and self-contradictions) but of law, in a putative ‘democracy’; so, even that article was sugar-coating the actual issues here, which are legal — NOT ‘ethical’. However, if ethics is to be taken out of the field of philosophy and into the field of the sciences, then this matter is AUTHENTICALLY an issue of ethics too, because the relevent laws in this case are scientific in every way if there is ever to be even the possibility of replacing the current aristocracy by an authentic democracy. Because what’s really at stake here isn’t merely ‘renovating’ the White House; it is revising our conception of what “democracy” MEANS.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.