Trump claims gala shooting gives urgency to White House ballroom plan

The US president pressed the case for his controversial ballroom initiative at the press conference he held at the White House on Saturday and a social media post on Sunday, after an armed attacker was arrested as he rushed towards the Hilton’s ballroom, where Trump was attending the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner.

The $400m construction project to build a giant event space began at the White House with the east wing being knocked down last October without Trump waiting for full legal permission to proceed. Legal challenges followed along with controversy over funding for the enormous ballroom, which is planned to be larger than the core White House itself.

“What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday morning.

He said that the shooting incident, which caused Trump and senior administration to be hustled out of the Hilton hotel complex, and hundreds of guests to duck for cover, “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House”.

Trump pointed to existing security at the White House – “the most secure building in the world” – and “every highest level security feature there is” planned for the ballroom. “Plus, there are no rooms sitting on top for unsecured people to pour in,” he added, referring to the event taking place in a mainstream hotel.

Trump’s comments were the second time in just over 12 hours that he mentioned the White House ballroom project in reference to the shooting incident.

“I didn’t want to say this,” Trump said at a press briefing late Saturday after returning to the White House from the press dinner, “but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got – it’s drone-proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

Trump has survived two previous assassination attempts, both during his 2024 election campaign. After the latest incident, Trump said in the White House briefing room that the scare would not impact the conduct of his life.

“I like not to think about it,” he said. “I lead a pretty normal life, considering, you know, it’s a dangerous life. I think I’m, I think I handle it as well – as well as it can be handled.

“To be honest with you, I’m not a basket case,” he added. But he also conceded that “it’s always shocking when something like this happens” and it had been “very unexpected”.

He told Weijia Jiang, the CBS News correspondent and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who was seated to his left at the dinner, that she’d done “a fantastic job. What a beautiful evening.”

Trump said he thought the noise that later turned out to be gunfire was “a tray going down. I’ve heard that many times, and it was a pretty loud noise, and it was from quite far away.”

Melania Trump, he said, “was very cognizant, I think, of what happened. I think she knew immediately what happened. She was saying: ‘That’s a bad noise.’” Trump said it was “a rather traumatic experience for her”.

Trump had been expected to roast the attending press corps during an after-dinner speech with what he said would have been the “most inappropriate speech ever made”. Even his being invited to the dinner was controversial after several years of calling the US media “the enemy of the people”. He has been repeatedly suing various media outlets, threatening broadcasters over their licenses and stepping up his attacks on some individual journalists when they ask him awkward questions.

On Saturday night he suddenly now thanked the gathered journalists at the White House press briefing room, most still in the eveningwear they had donned for the dinner event. He praised “very responsible” coverage of the drama that had unfolded and said that when the press dinner is reorganized he is likely to give a different speech than the one he had planned for Saturday night.

Then on Sunday, Trump said lawsuits seeking to stop the White House ballroom construction “must be dropped, immediately”, adding: “Nothing should be allowed to interfere with with its construction, which is on budget and substantially ahead of schedule.”

That view was supported by at least one moderate Democrat, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.

“That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the US government,” Fetterman posted on X, referring to the Washington Hilton. “After witnessing last night, drop the TDS (‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’), and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these,” he said.