US Politics
Who is paying for Trump’s ballroom? Amazon, Apple and Google are helping to pay for Trump’s ballroom as donor list revealed
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The full list of donors to President Donald Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project has been published, with Big Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft all chipping in.
Other notable contributors include the cryptocurrency businesses Coinbase and Ripple, the Winklevoss Twins, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Palantir Technologies, T-Mobile, Union Pacific Railroad, oil baron Harold Hamm, the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of the Glazer family, which owns Manchester United and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Trump held a gala dinner for some of his sponsors in the East Room last week – the opulence of the occasion at odds with the fact that federal workers are currently going unpaid because of the government shutdown – at which the president declared: “For 150 years-plus they’ve wanted to have a ballroom and it never happened because they’ve never had a real estate person.”
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Demolition work on the East Wing began Monday, a disquieting sight to many Americans that sparked a series of memes, including one of Trump riding a golden wrecking ball, and prompted CBS reporter Weijia Jiang to ask White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Thursday: “Can the president tear down anything he wants without oversight? Can he demolish this building or the Jefferson Memorial?”
“There have been many presidents in the past who have made their mark on this beautiful White House complex,” Leavitt answered.
“So it sounds like the answer is yes, he can tear down whatever he wants,” Jiang observed.
Leavitt urged those expressing horror at seeing mounds of destroyed drywall, smashed windows, insulation, wires, rubble and debris piled on the lawn to “trust the process.”
Trump is understood to regard reverting to the world of luxury property development as “relaxing” and to consider the 90,000 square foot ballroom a key component of his presidential legacy, along with the other redevelopment projects he has taken on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since returning to power, like the revamping of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden into a tiled patio resembling one at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida.
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The president reportedly pitched a larger ballroom to the Barack Obama administration a decade ago, even offering to pay for it himself, only for the proposal to be declined.
The current undertaking has been called “an ethics nightmare” by George W Bush-era White House chief ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who told the BBC: “It’s using access to the White House to raise money. I don’t like it. These corporations all want something from the government.”
Here’s the list of sponsors in full: