After a gunman allegedly attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month, Senator John Fetterman seized on the moment to accuse his fellow Democrats of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Fetterman tweeted: “Drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.”
In saying this, Fetterman gestured at a certain theory of our moment: Not everything Trump does is rooted in megalomania and dictatorial abuses of power. Trump can be right sometimes. Trump-obsessed Democrats who won’t admit this squander a chance to appeal to the Reasonable Middle. Similarly, when Trump started pushing the project last fall, some centrist Democrats ridiculed calls for the next Democratic president to tear it down, calling it a “distraction.”
Well, if opposing Trump’s ballroom carries echoes of TDS, it turns out some Republicans are afflicted with TDS, too. Punchbowl News reports that some Senate and House Republicans are balking at the ballroom project, now that the White House has demanded that its security be funded with $1 billion in taxpayer money:
Some of these skeptical Republicans feel the ballroom is just too politically toxic right now, especially when Trump said for so long that it would be paid for by private funds. Trump’s approval ratings are in the 30s. Gas is $4.55 per gallon. Trump can’t yet find a path to victory against Iran.
Republicans tell Punchbowl that the ballroom funding faces obstacles in the House, in part because it’s a tough vote for vulnerable House Republicans. As one put it: “A first-year poli-sci major would know not to ask members to take this vote, and we hope the speaker does too.”
All of which should prompt us to revisit the ballroom-as-distraction theory of the moment alluded to above, and ask: Why is Trump’s ballroom so politically toxic that Republicans in tough races are fearful about voting for it?
In the wake of the shooting incident, pro-Trump and right-wing personalities pushing for the ballroom thought they’d struck propaganda gold. Many of them excitedly smeared Democrats who oppose the project as tacitly encouraging the assassination of Trump. At a meta level, the real MAGA game here was to get Democrats to equivocate in the face of MAGA rage, to bully them into genuflecting before Trump’s plan to build a Caesar-like monument to himself at the center of the nation’s capital—and by extension submit to his broader dictatorial project.
In a sense, at moments like these, MAGA is at bottom asserting the power of fascist lies to remake political reality itself—and force Trump’s enemies to fear that they must adapt to MAGA-dictated reality or perish. Which of course must mean wholesale capitulation to Trump.
The Fetterman mode of politics cynically plays dumb about those deeper and more sinister intentions. Similarly, those Democrats who warned that the ballroom was a “distraction” from kitchen table issues effectively hand-waved away those darker intentions, proceeding as if they don’t carry big stakes for our civic well-being and democratic future.
But they do, and fortunately, most Democrats appeared to grasp those stakes, continuing to vociferously oppose the ballroom even after the shooting incident. They plowed right through MAGA’s fog of bullying propaganda and emerged on the other side unscathed. Result: The MAGA assault quickly dissipated and unceremoniously went poof. It’s a non-factor now—a big nothing.
Indeed, a Washington Post poll taken before and after the shooting incident found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular. It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans and supported by only 28 percent. Independents oppose it by a whopping 61-18, working class Americans by 54-28, and moderates by 64-16. Importantly, the Post polling done after the incident showed no clear shift toward support for the project, another sign that MAGA propaganda around it fizzled.
It’s not clear, of course, whether most ordinary voters oppose the ballroom merely because they want the president to focus on material things or because it represents a massive abuse of power suffused with Nero-level megalomania. It’s probably some of both.
After all, to build the ballroom, Trump bulldozed large swaths of the White House—which belongs to the American people—without congressional approval. A judge temporarily halted the project, but Trump used the shooting to try to browbeat him into rubberstamping it. The White House withheld the names of some well-heeled donors to the project, including some with business before the government. Trump’s fundraising for the ballroom has created new avenues for the wealthy to pay tribute to him, as part of his effort to transform the presidency into a massive Bribe Delivery System.
The ballroom should also be viewed alongside other Trumpian projects—the planned Triumphal Arch, the renaming of the Kennedy Center after himself, and the stamping of his face on our passports. As Bill Kristol notes, taken with all those other things, Trump’s plan to transform the People’s House into an “emperor’s palace” symbolizes a “broader effort to replace a republican regime with an imperial one.”
Understood in that context, MAGA efforts to bully Democrats into supporting the ballroom look more like an attempt to strongarm them into capitulating to that bigger imperial project. And when Democratic strategists say the ballroom is a “distraction,” they’re putting their heads in the sand about all these larger implications.
But the Post poll suggests that the ballroom has proven to be one of those things that breaks through to lower-information voters in unpredictable ways. If it’s true, as Derek Thompson says, that the smartphone is imperceptibly, indelibly transforming our politics, the ballroom might illustrate the point: With those dramatic and shareable images of Trump’s White House East Wing demolition, this saga has unexpectedly captured something larger than itself.
In fact, the deeper subtexts of the ballroom tale—the corruption, the megalomania, the careless Gatsby-esque destructiveness, the Trumpian imperium—are surely a key reason it has broken through. It’s creating the type of meaningful moment in our politics that offers surprising political openings to the opposition.
There’s been some talk about what Democrats running for 2028 should propose to do with the ballroom once Trump moves on. Here’s an idea: Pledge to convert it into a monument to American democracy—and all the struggles that have been fought on its behalf. For good measure, let’s throw in an exhibit about January 6. That’s just one thought—if you don’t like it, come up with another one. Democrats: If even Republicans are now running from the ballroom, surely it signals an opening for the ambitious among you to get very creative in response.
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