Trump White House ballroom won’t get WHCD buy-in, critics say

President Donald Trump, top officials in his administration and many MAGA figures are strongly pushing for a White House ballroom to be built, citing a shooting incident just outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that led to his evacuation from the event at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.

Trump and his backers say building the controversial and legally challenged $400 million grand ballroom that he envisions is essential to keeping him — and future presidents — safe from assassination attacks and other security threats.

But critics argue that a ballroom at the White House would not be accepted as a substitute for a private venue for non-governmental events and that presidents would undoubtedly travel around the country and world, appearing in public at many venues.

Despite that first claim, the Department of Justice, in a letter Sunday to a lawyer whose client is challenging the construction of the ballroom, suggested that the White House Correspondents’ Association could have its annual dinner at the ballroom once it is built.

“When the White House ballroom is complete, 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,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote Gregory Craig, who is representing the National Trust for Historical Preservation in its lawsuit seeking to block the ballroom from being built without Congress’s say-so.

But critics say Trump and his allies are cynically retrofitting their arguments for the ballroom by citing Saturday’s incident.

They also say there is good reason to believe that he — and any future president — would not stop attending events outside the White House grounds even if that ballroom ends up getting built.

They also scoff at the idea that the WHCA — an independent association of journalists who cover the White House — would agree to hold its dinner at the White House, much less when a harsh critic of the media like Trump occupies the Oval Office.

Weijia Jiang, the WHCA’s president and a reporter with CBS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC on that question.

But Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership
at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit that promotes journalistic ethics and development, said, “There’s no way they’re going to do that,” when she was asked about the idea of the WHCA holding its dinner at the White…