President Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally bulldoze the entirety of the White House’s East Wing this week has provided Democrats with new ammunition in the shutdown messaging war.
The party and its supporters have latched onto one video clip in particular: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying during her Thursday briefing, “The ballroom is really the president’s main priority.”
The quote came in response to a specific question about whether Trump had any other White House renovations scheduled, but the context hardly seemed to matter: Democrats had their line.
“Karoline Leavitt said the quiet part out loud: Donald Trump’s main priority is his ballroom makeover — not everyday Americans,” Kendall Witmer, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response director, said in a statement. “While working families are drowning under the weight of skyrocketing prices, and 22 million people are about to see massive price hikes to their health care premiums, Trump’s focus is demolishing the White House to build a $300 million ballroom bankrolled by his billionaire friends.”
“Trump has been unabashed in showing the American people who he really cares about helping: himself,” she added.
In the hours that followed Leavitt’s press briefing, Democratic lawmakers latched onto the sentiment, seeking to tie the White House construction to the shutdown and suggesting that the project was distracting Trump from working to end the current impasse.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren made the most explicit connection between the two: “We asked Donald Trump to cut health care costs. Instead, he cut off a wing of the White House.”
“They’re not even pretending to care about your health costs going up,” Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado said.
“We can tell,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania said in response to Leavitt’s remarks.
The federal government is nearing its fourth week of a shutdown, as disagreements over what to do with expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies have left Democrats and Republicans in a state of stasis. Trump has in recent weeks been disengaged from the legislative process, instead turning the spotlight on his foreign policy plans and the pricy new construction project.
“The discussions we’ve had, it’s difficult right now because you got to have Donald Trump engaged,” Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, told NOTUS this week. “It’s pretty clear that my Republican colleagues don’t want to do anything that might be counter to Donald Trump, and they want to be able to get marching orders from him and then take action at that point.”
Before construction began Tuesday, the proposal Trump repeatedly relayed to media organizations only included removing the East Wing’s facade. But as of Thursday evening, the entire East Wing had been demolished.
Trump defended his expanded construction project when asked Wednesday about the demolition, saying the East Wing was “very small” and “never thought of as being much.”
“In order to do it properly we had to take down the existing structure,” Trump told reporters.
As of Thursday night, just two Republicans have spoken out against the ballroom renovation. Sens. Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski both said the optics were poor amid the government shutdown.
“There’s a conflict in just the reality that people are seeing. They’re seeing the impact of a government shutdown on them and their families that is personal and with potential for really harmful impacts,” Murkowski told Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “And then they see Washington. Business as usual. We’re voting on judges and the East Wing of the White House is being taken down for a massive ballroom.”
The White House referred NOTUS back to an X post it made in response to Schumer, saying, “You’re a scumbag and a liar, Chuck — but everyone already knows that. She was answering a question specifically about construction projects on the White House grounds.”
“We’re talking about building a ballroom when we’re trying to get the economy squared away,” Tillis told reporters Wednesday. “The timing is bad.”