President Donald Trump’s White House construction goes beyond a ballroom, the commander-in-chief told reporters on Tuesday as he stood outside the construction site detailing the complexities of the massive addition.
“You might want to take a look at the complexity,” Trump said as he gestured toward the construction site on the premises. He explained that the ballroom is only part of the story. In fact, he described the ballroom itself as a “shield” of sorts, protecting all of the space currently being built underneath. That includes a military hospital, meeting rooms, and much more.
“These are all different rooms out here,” Trump said. “They’re building a hospital. They’re building a military hospital. They’re building all sorts of research facilities — also meeting rooms and rooms that go hand in hand for the military, using the ballroom, and the ballroom is really a shield and protecting all of the things that are built here.”
Trump explained that the construction already goes “very deep” — six stories deep.
“This is down because we’ve already done these floors, but these are already down two floors. That is down about six stories deep. That’s fixed up normally,” he said, walking through other features and complexities of this design.
“It’s all knit together between the drone proofing [and] the missile proofing. We have had the drone capacity upstairs. We can have all sorts of military up, whether — I hate to use the word snipers, but we have great sniper capacity,” the president said, revealing that it is “built for our snipers, not the enemy snipers.”
“And because of the height, we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington,” Trump said.
Trump’s brief tour followed the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determining that a plan drafted by Republican lawmakers to provide $1 billion in funding for the White House ballroom project did not follow the rules, although Republicans say they have a fix underway.
Hellbound and Down 