The Ballroom

This is the ballroom Donald Trump plans to build at the White House. If completed, it will be the largest addition to the building in nearly 100 years.

Ironically, though, it would bring the building closer to the original 1790 plans.

They were massive: three towering stories, a main building over 700 feet long, a dome to rival the Capitol’s, and four detached wings to accommodate an enormous court. [A, 18-19]

But there was a problem. The architect was French. His inspirations were French palaces like the Chateau de Compiegne and Versailles. George Washington did not want to look like a king. So he fired that architect.

The new plan was designed by an Irishman, James Hoban. Though still grand, Hoban’s design was one-fifth the size of the original, with two stories instead of three, a single rectangular building rather than a massive complex, and known thereafter not as a palace but merely as the “White House.” [A, 20-28]

The pivot matched Washington’s and the Constitution’s restrained vision for the Presidency: an office of equal or lesser power than Congress.

But since then, the world has changed. So has the Presidency. And so has the White House.

Over the last 200 years, the White House has exploded in size alongside the Presidency: a physical manifestation of an increasingly imperial executive with ever more power. Donald Trump’s ballroom is hardly the first step in this direction, and it couldn’t have happened without a few key Presidents who, in the midst of crisis, stretched presidential power and the White House to their limits.

This is the story of how the White House got so massive.

I. Washington Monument

For a long time after it was built, the White House didn’t grow. George Washington's presidency remained the gold standard: two terms, limited exercise of powers, and a harmonious, equal relationship with Congress. There was no need for a bigger executive residence. Instead, in 1848, construction began on the Washington Monument, dedicated to the memory of the first President's restraint. [P]

But then, something happened.

In 1861, Civil War broke out. Construction on the monument froze, and fittingly, Abraham Lincoln abandoned Washington's model for the presidency, instead seizing enormous new powers. Among his most ambitious acts was the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in rebel states. [I]

This was almost unquestionably illegal. But Lincoln argued that because he was charged by the Constitution to “take care” to implement the laws, in a time of war he was obliged to do whatever necessary to preserve the ultimate laws: the Constitution and the union it formed.

Washington couldn't have dreamed of doing anything like this—not just because he himself enslaved people. This was a shockingly expansive concept of Presidential authority, because it implied the right to fully ignore Congress and the Courts in a time of emergency, threatening the essence of the Constitution’s checks and balances.

Yet the White House didn't grow, and after the war, the Washington Monument was completed [P], and the Presidency returned to its co-equal position beside Congress. [C, 56-58]

Because the Civil War was a genuine emergency, and because Lincoln didn't actually expand Presidential power. Instead, he expanded his apparent authority, the limits on how he exercised power. The Emancipation Proclamation, for example, was a military directive. But when the war ended and the soldiers went home, the President no longer had any serious power. [C, 56-58] Congress amended the Constitution to truly abolish slavery. Congress held the purse, and without a standing army or large bureaucracy, even if the President had the authority to override Congress, he had no practical power to do so.

But Lincoln provided a blueprint. The question now was, what if presidential power does grow, what if the President does get a standing military and a large bureaucracy, and what if a future president—with far greater power than Lincoln—made the same argument? Could it be temporary, or would it unleash something unstoppable?

II. The West Wing

By the turn of the century, that power did begin to grow, because America was then in the midst of another crisis.

The industrial revolution had arrived, and its costs became apparent: deforestation, environmental collapse, poisonous foods, and unimaginable poverty.

Teddy Roosevelt knew that the presidency was too weak to meet these new challenges. Congress could draft endless laws on food safety and labor rights, but without a strong presidency to enforce them, none of it would be worth the paper it was written on. [C, 59-63]

So Roosevelt and Congress created numerous executive agencies, including the National Forest Service, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Labor, among others. But he needed more than agencies. Roosevelt needed the West Wing [B, 166-172]. Approved and funded by Congress, this was an office building for Roosevelt's growing cabinet: a necessity for managing this ballooning bureaucracy. At the same time, America embarked on wars of conquest in Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere, producing a larger, more professional standing military, and the National Guard. Presidential power was growing, and so was the White House. [C, 59-63]

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III. The East Wing

So industrialization happens, and Presidential power grows, as a way of coping, giving us the West Wing. In 1929, another crisis struck.

The Great Depression. Now things accelerate. In 1932, Teddy’s distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected on a platform of sweeping change to avoid similar future disasters.

FDR called his program "The New Deal," and it involved providing for the elderly who couldn't work, eliminating child labor, and preventing the super-rich from abusing the public and breaking the economy. Implementing it required more power, new agencies. So he and Congress created the Social Security Administration, Securities Exchange Commission, and National Labor Relations Board, among many others. [K]

Teddy's West Wing wasn't up to it, so in 1934 with Congressional funds and approval, FDR nearly tripled the size of the building, adding a second floor and digging out a basement. [A, 66] Then, another crisis.

In 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, pulling America into World War II.

Suddenly, FDR found himself at the head of the largest military America had ever seen, in a bigger fight than we'd ever been in. He was truly indispensable, and a new fear was born. What if the Axis bombed DC?

So FDR embarked on yet another Congressionally-funded expansion to the White House: the East Wing. From the outside, this appeared to be yet more offices, these for the First Lady and her staff. But a secret lay underground: the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bomb shelter and emergency war room. [A,67]

Under FDR, Presidential power exploded, and the White House followed suit. And even though throughout this period, Congress was still in the loop, still holding the purse, all these new agencies posed a serious danger. If they were accountable only to the president, he could assert a power to legislate by fiat, simply directing the bureaucracy to do things, even if those demands contradicted Congress’s laws. Luckily Congress made a number of agencies—like the SEC and NLRB—independent of the President [C, 92-95]. Still, the military was growing, many agencies were in his grasp, and those that weren’t were just out of reach.

IV: Secret Skeleton

In 1945, the stress of all those new powers sent FDR to an early grave.

In similar fashion, after 150 years of renovation and expansion, The White House too was on the verge of literal physical collapse. Under Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman, an architectural investigation warned the building was still standing “purely from habit.” [A, 70] In response, many sought a complete rebuild: this time from marble instead of limestone and wood.

But clearly that didn't happen. The White House we have today looks just as it did when FDR died. Because instead of a gaudy rebuild, in 1949, President Truman

had the entire interior gutted and rebuilt exactly as before, now hung on an invisible steel skeleton hidden between the walls. [A, 70]

The Presidency too was now in need of secretive support structures.

So Congress and Truman created new agencies: the Department of Defense, to coordinate a new, massive standing military; the Central Intelligence Agency, to conduct espionage operations; and a National Security Agency, to secure vital communications from foreign interception.

These are very different than either Roosevelts' agencies. They aren't about solving real problems at home. They're about protecting power: America's power on the world stage. That isn't necessarily an ignoble goal, but there's a problem here. It didn't Truman long to prove it.

Without Congressional authorization, he went to war in Korea [R, 21]. This was unprecedented.

The Constitution is very clear; Congress authorizes declarations of war [Q]. The commander in chief of the military cannot also be in charge of deciding war and peace. But America, Truman argued, was already terminally at war with Communism.

This was FDR's East Wing bomb shelter at its worst: a sort of fear and paranoia of an increasingly shapeless enemy, an increasingly permanent sense of emergency in which any exercise of power could be justified.

Yet Truman overplayed his hand. Congress constrained his war powers, and in 1952, when he sought to seize industrial facilities for military production, the Supreme Court blocked him. He stood down. [E] In so doing, the Court affirmed that those “Commander-in-Chief” powers had limits.

Yet they also established a blueprint to go further. They asserted the President had three kinds of power: affirmative, when he acts in concert with Congress; inherent, when he acts alone yet may be checked by Congress; and plenary, when he has ultimate authority which Congress cannot limit. [D, 616]

Justice Jackson knew those plenary powers were exceptionally dangerous, in his words, "for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.” [E]

This is a vital turning point in American history. The presidency started as a limited office, respecting Washington's precedent even after the interruption of the civil war [monument second half]. But the industrial revolution, Great Depression, World Wars, and Cold War brought more permanent expansions of presidential authority, with the White House growing to match. Domestic administrative powers came first, then expanded, then foreign powers, war powers, then secret powers, all amidst an increasingly permanent sense of emergency.

By Truman’s time, the arsenal of Presidential power was enormous. Yet Congress and the Supreme Court maintained important boundaries, limiting the exercise of those massive powers. But the Lincoln-era fear

— what if Presidential power grew, what if with those new powers in hand a President then crossed the rubicon like he did —

that fear was realer than ever. As Justice Jackson elaborated, as Presidential power had grown, so had the stakes of constraining its use. If even an apparently minor power became regarded as plenary, it might derail the entire balance of power in government.

V. The Third Floor

One president was intent on expanding those plenary powers.

Just after he was elected in 1980, Ronald Reagan embarked on a minor project at the White House: for the first time, he had the third floor furnished. [B, 303-305]

Not a huge deal, except this project was financed by large donations from individuals and corporations, not Congress, which, as was its constitutional authority, typically held the purse strings for such projects. They'd had a long history of rejecting funds for Presidential expansions: symbolically manifesting their very real authority over the office. But that was changing.

The seeming smallness of the project belied monumental intentions.

Reagan had campaigned on deregulation: "shrinking the government." But he didn't have Congress on his side. So in order to “deregulate” the large bureaucracy that had grown up since FDR, in 1980 Reagan’s legal team put forward a novel legal argument:

unitary executive theory. They asserted — not too differently than Lincoln did during the civil war — that all executive power was vested by the Constitution in the president and that it was all plenary. [G]

This meant Reagan was entitled to “deregulate” by firing and managing bureaucrats despite whatever objections Congress might have. Maybe that even feels pretty common sense: executive bureaucracy, head of the executive, but there are problems.

First, Reagan begins attaching notes—called, Signing Statements—to laws he doesn’t like when he signs them, wherein he calls the laws unconstitutional and directs the bureaucracy not to enforce them. This is crazy because, if when Congress passes a law it’s up to the President whether that actually gets enforced, then what power does Congress even have?

But this theory goes further, implying that any agency or executive function not directly accountable to the President was unconstitutional. This meant, for example, the independence of agencies like the SEC or NLRB, and laws establishing independent powers for the investigation of corruption were illegal. [G]

This is insane.

If true, it would mean the President could simply fire anyone who investigated him or his administration for corruption. Which is exactly what Reagan attempted to do in 1988.

Luckily the Supreme Court saw how insane this was, and they ruled 7-1 against Reagan. [F] The lone dissenter was Antonin Scalia, who’d been appointed to the court by Reagan after helping formulate the unitary executive theory. Reagan’s disciples now had their mission: more plenary power required more ideologues like Scalia on the bench.

The White House, like the Presidency, had been growing. Only self-restraint had held various Presidents back from taking full advantage of it. Reagan seized those powers while asserting his independence from Congress. There were still limits, but if a real crisis struck, anything could happen.

VI. Snipers on the Roof

On September 11, 2001, it was believed terrorists attempted to fly a plane into the White House.

The building was closed to the public for two years. Guardhouses cropped up all over the grounds. Nearby roads were closed. Classified air defense enhancements were installed. Snipers moved in on the roof. [A, 86]

The Presidency, of course, changed too.

Bush revived Reagan’s unitary executive theory and expanded it on account of the wartime circumstances. Like Lincoln, he argued he was compelled to do anything he judged necessary to preserve the Constitution, even if Congress disagreed. The nightmare scenario was now real. The power at Bush’s disposal was unlike anything Lincoln could have imagined. [G]

Immediately, Bush ordered Truman’s National Security Agency—originally tasked with protecting American communications from espionage—to instead spy on American communications without warrants. He reasserted the power to launch preemptive wars without Congressional consent and to determine treatment of prisoners of war. [H] Thereafter, those captured in his “war on terror” were tortured brutally.

When Congress passed laws to stop the torture, Bush utilized Reagan’s signing statement strategy, simply signing the laws into force but attaching notes saying he refused to enforce them because, they would undercut his ability to preserve the Constitution. [G] In fact, Bush was so prolific in this practice, he ended up lodging nearly 1,200 Constitutional objections: more than every other President in history combined.

Under Reagan, the President effectively claimed the power to legislate without Congress. Under Bush, this power was taken to the absolute extreme.

Since then, unlike Lincoln’s expansions, the White House has remained a fortress, and the President’s “wartime” powers have proven ominously permanent. In fact, they’ve only grown,

as Obama continued Bush’s practice of legislation via bureaucracy with policies like DACA, and expanded Presidential war powers in the middle east.

VII. The Ballroom, Revisited

Then there’s Trump.

This building is like Reagan's third floor renovation on steroids. First of all, it's going to cost $250 million, without a single dollar being appropriated by Congress. The legislature's own "plenary power"—taxing and spending—has been critically compromised.

Instead, the money is coming from corporations like Palantir and Google, either willingly donated or extracted by the president through lawsuits that, if brought by anyone else in American society, would have been thrown out in seconds. [N, M]

Likewise, he's further expanded Presidential war powers, bombing Iran without congressional authorization and sinking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.

Moreover, he’s done what Reagan failed to. Backed by a Scalia-disciple-majority Supreme Court, he’s fired heads of independent agencies and inspectors general whose jobs were to investigate and prevent corruption.

This is a vital move for him. Consider this. When Bulgaria gave George W. Bush a puppy in 2006, Bush turned the dog over to the National Archives, because accepting gifts from foreign leaders is corrupt and illegal. Trump, on the other hand, intends to accept a jumbo-jet from Qatar. [L]

That’s right; the ballroom isn’t just the single largest and most expensive addition to the White House since it was built: a 90,000 square foot, gilded symbol of Presidential power and largess. It also perfectly represents the corruption which comes as a result of that unchecked executive.

Think back to the original Versailles-inspired plans for the White House. The ballroom's similarity isn't just about scale or aesthetic. Trump is building it the way King Louis XIV built Versailles palace: extracting money and loyalty from wealthy courtiers, dispensing favors and tax cuts in return.

In the process, ordinary Americans lose their power to check his ambitions and shape government policy. Think about the most important episodes of his second term so far:

DOGE; national guard deployments in major cities; purges of top military officers; censorship of colleges and media companies; mass deportations to foreign concentration camps without due process; and rapid expansions to ICE, a faceless militarized police force accountable only to the President.

This is not about policy. It’s about consolidating unprecedented and unchecked power in the Presidency. They have literally said this out loud.

Plenary power means uncheckable power. Supreme authority. And that comes at a cost to your power, your rights, and your equality as a citizen.

VIII. Conclusion

This imperial presidency has, as we’ve seen through these White House expansions, been the project of both Democrats and Republicans.

Any ambitious president — and they are all ambitious — will seek more power. Their reasons are also not always bad.

Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt needed the West Wing to regulate corporate abuse of our land and workers. Lincoln and FDR needed a powerful presidency to win existential wars against slavers and nazis.

Crises from time to time demand the energetic exercise of the executive office in the public interest. Yet it’s crucial that in the wake of crisis, those new powers are checked and balanced by Congress. Under Reagan, that balancing act began to fall apart, and since Bush it has all but totally collapsed. Trump and his ballroom reveal just how dangerous this consolidation of power in the executive has become and how much corruption it enables.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Congress has reined in ambitious presidents in the past.

Before Teddy's little West Wing, more ambitious presidents proposed quadrupling the size of the White House. Congress stopped them. When Richard Nixon abused secretive powers and attempted to meddle in American elections, Congress stepped in and inaugurated a rare period of Congressional dominance in modern politics.

Besides, god forbid, the military, an aggressive Congress is Trump’s last potential obstacle to fully consolidating and removing limits on the vast arsenal of presidential power that was intentionally built to be limited and shared with the Courts and Congress. It’s why he’s called on Republican states to gerrymander like hell to save him from midterm retaliation. [O] Never be fooled into thinking votes don’t matter. They terrify tyrants. It’s why they rig elections. Voters must empower Congress and demand they check the Presidency once more. The only question is, by the time we can, what of our Constitution will be left to save.

Post-Script

We worked like hell on this video: many long nights reading law journal articles, writing and rewriting this script, and designing and printing all these models. We chose this new production style, instead of animations, to emphasize the human element of our work: something quickly vanishing from the AI-fucked web. If you believe in what we do and want to help make more stories that matter to democracy, consider patronizing our sponsor, by downloading AnyDesk for free, grabbing some of our merch like this shirt, this coffee mug, or this poster, dropping a super thanks down below, or by joining our Patreon. And as always, thanks for watching.

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