The Supreme Court prevented a district court order from going into effect that would have required the Trump administration to halt construction of the White House State Ballroom on August 21st. The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request that it stay the lower court decision because it realized that the balance of equities clearly weighed in favor of allowing construction to continue. That is because, despite Democrats’ and the media’s effort to portray the ballroom as a vanity project, it is a necessary security complex meant to protect the President and the continuity of government.
Read more We Can Have Both: Critical Minerals and America’s Natural Beauty
Equipped with a law degree and common sense, I read the written testimony of top administration officials and those officials tasked with protecting the President’s safety that was included in the of the administration’s Supreme Court application. The filing included declarations by Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll; Secret Service Director Sean Curran; Garret R. Hoffman, the Director of the White House Military Office; Jeremy Eichberger, the Secret Service agent in charge of the presidential protective division; Stephen Miller, the Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others.
This is not a partisan issue. President Trump and future Presidents must be kept safe.
Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll said that the ballroom — a fortified superstructure whose foundation extends 50 feet below the ground — is necessary in order to shield the new Presidential Emergency Operations Center that is being built underground. There already was an underground operations center, but it was severely outdated as it was built during World War II.
Driscoll, an Iraq war combat veteran and Yale Law School graduate, said that the ballroom is designed to absorb the initial impact of explosive drone swarms, missile attacks, and even a nuclear strike. His written testimony described the ballroom as a “sacrificial outer cover” meant to protect the underground premises. “From a civil engineering perspective, this outer layer forces the detonation to occur at a designated distance, creating a critical air gap known as standoff or ‘attic depth’,” Driscoll said.
He said without the ballroom, which is really a superstructure built as a shield for the underground complex, “engineers would need to dig impractically deep” to make the already five-story bunker secure. He further explained that, based on an analysis conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the hypothetical small “topping structure” that the district court order would have permitted would not be sufficient to protect the underground complex.
Driscoll highlighted that the Ukrainian government has largely operated from an underground bunker since the start of the war and that the ability to do so is a necessity of modern warfare.
The security structure (also known as the ballroom) is not just necessary to protect the continuity of government — it is necessary to protect this president and future presidents. “Specific to the White House complex, the President of the United States is the number one target of threats and assassination plots in the world,” Miller noted.
Miller also warned that, if the lower court order that halted construction had gone into effect, it would have created “a new and immediate threat by forcing the government to tolerate an open construction site on the White House lawn.”
Miller’s concern was shared by Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, the Director of the CIA, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin. In their joint written testimony, they said that halting construction would allow foreign adversaries and other bad actors to conduct remote imaging of the construction site, implant collection devices, and conduct other bad acts with the intent of undermining the security of the United States.
President Trump’s assertion that the people who brought the lawsuit are undermining the security of the United States is based in fact.
You wouldn’t know any of this if you watched MS NOW. On that channel, the research of world-class engineers and security experts is replaced with condescending humor that comes from left-wing hosts. When Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., joined On the Line with Alicia Menendez Monday, Menendez asked him whether the ballroom “is a question of national security or fancy parties?”
Had she read the filings, she would have asked a more intelligent question. Rep. Boyle, for his part, didn’t seem to have read the written testimony of the individuals tasked with protecting the President and the continuity of government itself.
“Well it’s absolutely absurd,” Boyle said. He said that Trump “wants to be able to throw fancy parties for the billionaire class that he hangs out with at Mar a Lago.” Boyle, despite his grandstanding, raises most of his money from New York despite being a Pennsylvania Congressman and has received large contributions from private equity firms. The same members of Congress who rail against billionaires often spend hours a day calling donors to ask for money.
Boyle also incorrectly asserted that the first time Trump expressed concerns about his own safety as it relates to the ballroom was after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.
Read more DSA’s ‘Solidarity’ With Cuba Looks a Lot Like Solidarity With Castro
“Suddenly, he invents, ‘wait a minute, this is a way I can justify the ballroom,’” Boyle said. Boyle was incorrect.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting occurred on April 23rd. Prior to that, on April 13th, the lawsuit defendants — which includes Trump in his official capacity as President — by Matthew C. Quinn, the Deputy Director of the Secret Service, which said that the ballroom itself was necessary to protect the President, the First Family, and all the people within the White House Complex.
He also argued that the project was necessary to protect the structure beneath it because its features were integrated with the underground facility. In addition, he maintained that leaving the site unfinished would make it more difficult for the Secret Service to secure the White House or evacuate the President in an emergency.
Congressman Boyle’s timeline was therefore incorrect: Trump, through his attorneys, had been making these security arguments in court before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. If anything, the shooting provided further evidence of the security concerns cited in support of completing the ballroom.
The MS NOW host did nothing to challenge the congressman — either because she did not know he was wrong, or because she did not care. This goes to a broader problem in how the media has covered this issue, and how Democrat politicians have talked about it. “Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?” is the modus operandi they seem to be following. Better yet, “why bother to learn the facts at all?”
On a separate MS NOW show, The 11th Hour, Tim O’Brien, the Senior Executive Editor of Bloomberg Opinion and a political analyst for MS NOW, called the project “essentially a gargantuan vanity project.”
In that same segment, Julie Roginsky, a Democrat strategist, said that whoever the next President is should “detonate the [newly constructed] East Wing” as their first presidential act.
“I don’t care how much it costs in taxpayer money,” she said.
Roginsky hates Trump so much — or at least pretends to in order to score social points with MS NOW bookers — that she wants to blow up a multi-hundred million dollar project that is meant to ensure the continuity of government in times of a security crisis.
Further, as a practical matter, the ballroom is being built using “the hardest and strongest concrete there is”, and already includes 6.4 million pounds of reinforcing bars. For the facades alone, the federal government has already procured one million pounds of steel. How Roginsky plans to blow all that up without also destroying the entire White House is not clear to anyone with common sense.
Sen. Chuck Schumer called the project a “monument to Trump’s ego” and a “vanity project.” Schumer should know better, as he’s been in the Senate since before 9/11 and has presumably considered national security matters over the years. However, given that he is unpopular in his own party and that his future in the Senate is subject to the will of House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he is using his caricature of the ballroom as a pinata to try to improve his standing in the party.
The information contained in the Trump administration’s Supreme Court filing makes clear that the ballroom is necessary to protect Trump and future presidents. One of the Secret Service agents who submitted written testimony in favor of the ballroom, Jeremy Eichberger, protected President Obama and President Biden during their presidencies. He called the security enhancements “critical and overdue.”
This is not a partisan issue. President Trump and future Presidents must be kept safe. As noted by Eichberger and others, the threat environment “has reached unprecedented levels of danger for the President.” With that being the case, and with Trump having survived so many known assassination attempts that the public has a hard time keeping track, it is essential that all steps are taken to protect the President.
The Supreme Court was right to intervene in order to allow construction to continue, and it should quickly and unequivocally dismiss this lawsuit in its entirety.
Read more One Night Only : The Covid Lockdown Movie Nobody Meant to Make
READ MORE from Joe Silverstein:
Dear AOC, Hasan Piker Is Not Joe Rogan
Orwell Comes to Gracie Mansion
Why Conservatives Should Not Abandon Free Speech
About the Author
