Another Reason the White House Ballroom Is an Eyesore
One of the less-discussed traditions of American presidents is how they hide the reality that they need protection. Following the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, however, Donald Trump and his allies have doubled down on their assertion that the ballroom he wants to build is essential to presidential safety.
The justifications have been strikingly granular: The new building would have “bullet proof windows and glass,” “heavy steel,” and a “drone proof roof,” as Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing Monday night that echoed Trump’s recent posts on Truth Social. Congressional Republicans have shared that the building will have seven-inch-thick windows, amid their push to get taxpayers to spend $400 million on a project that Trump once billed as a gift from patriotic donors. As the Trump administration works to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to stop the ballroom’s construction, the structure sounds more and more like a fortress.
It’s hard to keep track of the reasons to object to the president’s pet project, among them the administration’s bad-faith handling of the demolition and review processes, the structure’s unpopularity with Americans, and the way its composition violates rules of classical architecture. The latest reason emerged after a federal judge ordered construction to pause. The ruling allowed work on belowground features related to national security to proceed, referring to plans for a military facility beneath the new East Wing that the judge was able to review. In response, the White House began to argue that the aboveground portions were also related to national security, because they would protect the president. Since then, the details have just kept coming.
Although tight security at the White House is nothing new, this kind of talk is, and it represents another way this presidency has abandoned its imperative of projecting modesty, openness, and stability. Even if the White House is a stronghold, it is not meant to look like one.
[Read: White House architecture was an honor system. Trump noticed.]
When executive-branch officials have discussed the compound’s security features, they have sometimes taken an apologetic tone. Following a 2014 incident in which a man breached the main door of the White House, President Obama’s press secretary described the challenge as “balancing the need to ensure the safety and security of the first family, while also ensuring that the White House continues to be the People’s House.”
Foregrounding the infrastructure that keeps the presidency safe undermines the democratic symbolism of the White House. Its visibility from the street, its modest materials, the tricks that make it seem smaller than it is, the fact that ordinary people can tour parts of it: All of these contribute to the impression that the White House serves a government accountable to its citizens. But these principles are in tension with the security required. Each fence, bollard, and inch of blast-resistant laminated glass is a barrier between the people and their government.
Virtually every modern presidency has understood this, leaning into discretion and gesturing toward transparency even as new security measures have been unfurled over time. It was a bit of a fiction, but now we see the alternative, and it is grim. As one Department of Justice lawyer wrote of the ballroom project in a letter after the Correspondents’ Dinner, “President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom.”
Discretion has been the watchword of presidential security since the Secret Service began protecting presidents in 1901, following William McKinley’s assassination at a world’s fair in Buffalo. From then until now, the officers closest to the president have dressed in nonthreatening clothes and avoided attention. Everyone knows that there are guns nearby, but they appear only when threats emerge, as they did at the Correspondents’ Dinner.
The same is true for the security of the White House complex. The public rarely hears about defense features until an incident happens, such as when bullets shattered glass in 2011 or a radar anomaly put authorities on alert in 2019, exposing a missile battery. For one thing, secrecy is its own kind of protection. More abstractly, these features remind us that our world is more fragile, and the president is more vulnerable, than we want to believe. Inconspicuous security supports the president’s role as a steadying presence for Americans, allies, markets, and more. The White House played a similar role in projecting this serenity, which is one reason its main fence stood only about six feet tall until 2019.
The tenor of White House security was set under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Following a report by the architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the administration replaced an assortment of barricades with 3,500 feet of wrought-iron pickets on a stone base. The design was essentially an extension of one of the site’s oldest features: a fence erected on the north side in 1819. From the 19th century to World War I, the White House grounds had been accessible to a degree that can seem startling today. In general, the north side, which was the formal entrance for business and social events, was basically open. The long lawn to the south remained mostly off-limits—but not for security reasons so much as keeping nosy tourists away from the first family.
[Read: The shooting is not a reason to speedrun Trump’s ballroom]
In the lead-up to World War II, FDR constructed an ersatz shelter in the basement of the adjacent Treasury Building, the first leg of a large network under the complex. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he rebuilt the tiny East Wing to conceal construction of an underground air-raid shelter just to its south. Despite being protected by nine feet of concrete ceiling, it was obsolete once the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon. As missiles grew more advanced, the government shifted its security strategy to one of movement and dispersal. Presidential emergency facilities such as Mount Weather in Virginia and Raven Rock in Pennsylvania were established as centers to which essential personnel could evacuate in an emergency.
For threats smaller than nuclear armageddon, visible security upgrades remained minor for the rest of the Cold War. The streets on either side of the White House closed, better gates went up, and armed guards appeared on the mansion’s roof. The posture changed dramatically in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb next to a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 people. Jersey barriers and concrete planters sprung up around Washington, D.C., and General Services Administration officials began talking about “standoff distance.”
On the advice of the Secret Service, President Bill Clinton ordered Pennsylvania Avenue on the north side of the White House closed to vehicles. Publicly, he was apologetic about the event, dedicating his entire radio address on May 20 to justify the measures. “I will not in any way allow the fight against domestic and foreign terrorism to build a wall between me and the American people,” Clinton said. “We cannot allow ourselves to be frightened or intimidated into a bunker mentality.” Hedging on whether it would be permanent, the president said he had barred traffic out of deference to experts and the Secret Service that guarded his life. (The area remains closed to vehicles today.)
The hope that it might be temporary lasted six years. After the September 11 attacks, the Secret Service blocked vehicles from the road that runs immediately south of the White House, E Street NW. A slew of unexplained construction projects occurred under George W. Bush and Obama, from the front of the West Wing to an obscure site in nearby East Potomac Park. However, worksites were shrouded and officials stayed quiet about their nature. That may have been in part to keep any adversaries (or lone wolves) guessing.
But there also seemed to be a sense of embarrassment about what were considered necessary evils. Public frustration at the closure of the two east-west roads led to projects that reclaimed them. In 2004, Pennsylvania Avenue at Lafayette Park was transformed by the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh into a lively pedestrian plaza where tourists mingled with protesters. To the south, a similar project would have blended E Street into a revived Ellipse, the grassy park between the White House and the Washington Monument. The design by Rogers Marvel used every trick imaginable to make its truck barriers disappear.
This new norm deteriorated in Obama’s second term, when a series of individuals climbed FDR’s low fence, including one who popped through the mansion’s main door in 2014. The Secret Service seemed to have had enough. The fence was raised to 13 feet of total height. Construction began in 2019 and wrapped the compound by 2021. The first Trump administration also abandoned the plans for E Street without explanation.
Security became more imposing in 2020. On May 29, protesters responding to the murder of George Floyd assembled in front of the new, towering fence. Trump was rushed into FDR’s air-raid shelter. As the protests went on, deeper layers of security rose around the White House. On June 1, protesters were aggressively pushed back to install mesh riot barriers, sealing off about 100 acres of Washington. Trump bragged on Twitter that any protesters who might have made it over the White House fence would have faced “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons.” Since then—and yet more prominently after the January 6, 2021, insurrection—those metal barriers have been a regular sight around D.C., even going up for the White House Easter Egg Roll, as more and more of Pennsylvania Avenue has slipped from the public domain.
Thirty years ago, Clinton warned about falling into a bunker mentality. Now a bunker seems to occupy the entire mind of his successor. From FDR to Obama, classified facilities were built under cover, and security upgrades were made quietly. Even the report on the major 2014 incident is heavily redacted.
In contrast, with every setback against his ballroom project, Trump discloses more of its secret features. The presence of a medical suite, some kind of reinforced roof, and specialized air handling: The president is being compulsively transparent about topics that none of his predecessors was. Yet in making the barriers between himself and the people so visible, he has eroded the symbolism of the White House. Even when precautions were necessary, presidents once felt shame about their distance from the people.