On October 24, 2025, the sound of heavy machinery echoed across the White House lawn as demolition crews began tearing down the historic East Wing. The reason? President Donald Trump’s audacious plan to erect a 90,000-square-foot golden ballroom, a $300 million project that’s already sending shockwaves through Washington and beyond. The ballroom, expected to dwarf even the grandest of presidential renovations in recent memory, is being touted by Trump as a privately funded endeavor, with support from several major tech companies and what he calls “many generous patriots.” But the symbolism, as many critics argue, reaches far beyond bricks and mortar.
On HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher the same evening, host Bill Maher didn’t mince words about what he saw as the true message behind the construction. “The symbolism is he’s not leaving,” Maher said, referencing the ballroom’s scale and opulence. “Who puts in a giant ballroom if you’re leaving?” he pressed, his tone a blend of incredulity and concern. The panel, which included former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele and ex-Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, quickly turned the conversation into a heated debate about the meaning of the White House itself and the precedent being set.
Steele, who grew up in Washington, D.C., was visibly unsettled by the loss of the East Wing. “We watched this week the destruction of a symbol of this government,” he lamented. “Of our democracy, of our pluralistic society.” For Steele, the White House was never just a building. “It meant something to me as a 10-year-old,” he recalled, describing the pride and awe he felt as a child when his father took him past the iconic structure. “It meant something to me to grow up in a town where everybody in this country came and protested and cried and screamed and laughed… So that building, to me, was my childhood.”
Maher, initially dismissive—“It’s a building, Mike”—eventually conceded that the issue wasn’t just about architecture. “He should have gotten the permits, but that’s how he does things… I agree, but it is just a building, first of all,” Maher admitted, before pointing out that previous presidents had also left their marks on the White House. “Nixon put in a bowling alley. Obama made the tennis court a basketball court. I can’t get this mad about everything, Mike. I just can’t.” Still, Maher’s underlying worry remained: “What could President Trump not do? He’s drunk with power.”
Kate Bedingfield, for her part, argued that the East Wing demolition was symptomatic of a larger, more troubling pattern. “If this was the only impulsive, reckless, you know, driven by his own desire for self-aggrandizement… then I would give you it’s just a building,” she said. “But it’s not. It’s part of a manner of governing that is tearing at some of the foundations, the institutional foundations in this country. And that’s scary.”
The controversy hasn’t been limited to the Beltway. In Birmingham, Alabama, drivers along the Red Mountain Expressway were greeted on October 23 by a satirical billboard that depicted Trump dressed as King Louis XVI, the ill-fated French monarch. The billboard, the work of the local activist group Birmingham Blue Dot, lampooned the president’s ballroom as a tone-deaf monument to vanity during a time of national crisis. “This administration and the people who blindly follow it, are literally taking food out of the mouths of our children,” said Joellyn Beckham, the group’s organizer and chief designer. “If donor money goes to Trump’s cavernous, golden ballroom, then that money is not going somewhere where people desperately need it now. How many Alabamians will ever see that ballroom? Much less dance in it?”
The timing of the project has only added fuel to the fire. As the government remains shuttered due to a bitter standoff over healthcare subsidies, Democrats and Republicans in Congress continue to trade blame. Democrats have refused to approve temporary funding resolutions that don’t include extensions for expiring healthcare provisions under the Affordable Care Act, while Republicans accuse them of political grandstanding. Alabama Senator Katie Britt, echoing her party’s frustration, criticized Democrats for “creating this political theater… at the very cost of the people that we serve.”
Back in Washington, the ballroom’s construction has been likened to the extravagance of the Palace of Versailles, a comparison that has surfaced in both protest art and letters to the editor. “He wants to make the People’s House look like the Palace of Versailles, because he and his Cardinal Richelieu Stephen Miller do not plan to ever leave,” wrote one Ohioan in a letter published in The Columbus Dispatch. The writer went on to lament the loss of the East Wing, calling the White House “the most iconic symbol of American democracy, now overshadowed by the Golden Temple Ballroom.”
Others have drawn even starker historical parallels. “Let them eat cake,” wrote another Ohioan, invoking the infamous phrase attributed to Marie Antoinette. “Centuries later, history rhymes. Our modern monarch doesn’t wear a crown, but he gilds up his office… and constructs a ballroom while the government is shut down and millions of Americans lose the support they rely on. It’s as if his motto was ‘Let them just dance.’” The letter went on to argue that “empathy, not excess, is what feeds a nation’s soul.”
The debate over the ballroom has also reignited concerns about Trump’s ambitions. On his show, Maher openly worried that the project was a harbinger of Trump’s refusal to relinquish power, despite constitutional term limits. “The symbolism is he’s not leaving,” Maher said, even floating the possibility that Trump might seek a third term in defiance of the 22nd Amendment. That notion, once dismissed as far-fetched, was given a jolt of credibility when former Trump strategist Steve Bannon claimed in a recent interview that there was a plan for Trump to secure a third term.
Supporters of the president, meanwhile, have largely dismissed the uproar as overblown. They point to previous White House renovations—some of them quite lavish—as evidence that presidents have always left their personal imprint on the residence. Yet, as critics are quick to point out, no prior project has matched the sheer scale or symbolism of the current ballroom initiative, nor has any come at such a fraught political moment.
For now, the East Wing lies in rubble, and the ballroom’s skeleton is rising, golden and gleaming, where once stood a symbol of American democracy. Whether history will remember the project as a bold vision or a monument to excess remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the battle over the soul—and the symbolism—of the White House is far from over.
