What’s under Trump’s ballroom? | If You're Listening | ABC NEWS In-depth

When you imagine the White House, what do you picture?It's the big columns, right?The bit underneath the spaceship on the front cover of a DVD of Independence Day.You know, the bit they show at the end of the title sequence of the West Wing.Well, there is a bit of an irony to that because That's not the West Wing at all.If you look at the White House from above, it's clearly three buildings connected by narrow colonnades.

There's the Residence and the East and West Wings, with a total of 132 rooms.Right now, the largest room in the White House is the East Room.Which, confusingly, is not in the East Wing.It's in the Residence.But when you see the President walking down that long corridor to make a big announcement like this...

The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.

He's walking into the East Room.If you listen carefully, you can hear the echo.It's a pretty big room.It's used for everything from press conferences to musical performances.And while it is a big room, it's not that big.You can only seat about 200 people.

bigger events require a bigger space.And so during the Obama administration, they created that space by knocking up a big tent on the South Lawn.Cheers.Sitting at home in his private club in Florida, a certain property tycoon was horrified that fancy events such as state dinners were being held outdoors in a tent.He decided to try and do something about it.

But recently I saw that they were in a tent in the White House.I offered for nothing to build a $50 million ballroom because I said, you know what, when a foreign countrycomes over, they shouldn't be in a tent.They should be in a ballroom.

The person he talked to was senior Obama adviser David Axelrod.

And he said, you know, I build ballrooms.I build the greatest ballrooms.You can come down to Florida and see them.

Needless to say, the idea of allowing a reality TV host to build a new White House ballroom was a little bit too complicated for Axelrod to deal with at that particular point in time.So he left Trump on read.They never got back to me.

It's a hundred million dollar gift.They never got back to me.They should say, Trump's going to give us a hundred million dollars.He's going to build the ballroom.It's going to be magnificent.And why wouldn't they get back to me?

That's the problem with this country.

Well, 15 years after Donald Trump made that call, he's addressing the problem with the country and finally building the ballroom.You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back.

You hear that sound?That's music to my ears, I love that sound.When I hear that sound, it...Reminds me of money.

Over the last few months, the east wing of the White House has been ripped down and an enormous area has been excavated to build not just a ballroom, but a security complex underneath.

Donald Trump is eager to stress that no taxpayers' money is being spent on this project.He often says he's paying for it himself.In fact, a collection of wealthy donors have put up the funds, but we don't know who, we don't know how much and we don't know what they might get in return.

Now, this ballroom project isn't popular.In fact, President Trump is suffering serious pushback from the public, with only 28 % of Americans supporting what the media and Democrats are calling...Donald Trump's ballroom vanity project.

Trump's vanity project.

Donald Trump's vanity ballroom.

This is a billion dollars, and it's taxpayer money, and it's for a vanity project that no one needed.

Now, I've got a slightly different take on this.I think the saga of the ballroomis in fact far more interesting than just a story about a building project.I think it would have actually been relatively easy to build this project back in 2010 when Trump first started campaigning for it.I think what's really happening here is that Trump is struggling to swallow his own medicine.Today, we're going to look at the extraordinary history of White House renovations.

From giant mysterious holes in the ground, to secret tunnels and bunkers, to the time one 20th century president basically demolished the entire building.Everyone has decided this is Trump at his most unhinged, but I think it might actually be one of the more normal things that he's ever done.And that's exactly why it's blowing up in his face.I'm Matt Bevan and this is IF YOU'RE LISTENING.Roosevelt made alterations to the West Wing and built the whole East Wing to cover up a bunker he had dug to protect the President from air attacks.But he'd left the residence, the original building with the columns, totally untouched.

That was a bit of a problem for Harry Truman.See, Truman loved playing the piano in the East Room.He would hold concerts there, where he would play alongside more accomplished pianists like Eugene List.And there's a story about one of theconcerts by Eugene List that you've just got to hear.Harry's grandson Clifton told it at an event at the Truman Library.

Mr. List gave a concert at the White House in the East Room and during the concert engineers came to my grandfather and told him that the 1 ,200 pound chandelier hanging over everybody's head was was about to let go.

See, it was a well -known fact around the White House in the late 40s that the residence wasn't in good shape.In fact, it was starting to fall apart.

And grandpa had a choice to make and he took what for me seems a rather risky choice for Harry Truman.He let the concert go on and they took the chandelier down the next day.

Soon after this, according to Clifton Daniel, The weight of his mother's piano on the floor of the upstairs sitting room started causing the house to literally collapse.

The leg of mom's piano had gone through the floor and it went through the floor above the family dining quarters and actually lowered the ceiling in the family dining room by a foot and a half.The floor just sort of caved in under the weight of the piano.And that was kind of the last straw.

Truman moved the entire family out of the residence and into a nearby building reserved for VIP guests of the president.And then he ordered the entire interior of the White House residence to be demolished.The exterior walls of the residence were maintained, shored up by steel beams, but the entire interior was removed.Once all of the internal walls and floors were gone, the diggers came in, hollowing out a space under it for two new basement levels.Then the entire thing was rebuilt from the bottom basement up to the fourth floor.With the walls and roof still in place, everything had to be swung in through the windows and assembled inside like a ship at sea.

a bottle.The family were out of the house for three years.But when they returned, Truman invited camera crews in for the first ever televised tour of the White House.

is where Mrs Truman and I stand when we have state receptions.

He showed the news reporters through the ornate, beautiful and seemingly historical rooms.

Mr President, might we take a look at the East Room now?

He played Mozart on the East Room pianos.But none of it was real.Truman had kind of broken the seal here.He'd turned the White House into essentially a museum replica of itself.None of it was actually original anymore.So really, renovating the floor plan became a free -for -all for all future presidents.

Kennedy built the Situation Room on the ground floor of the West Wing.Nixon tore out the indoor pool and replaced it with a bowling alley and the press briefing room.Carter put solar panels on the roof.Reagan ripped the solar panels back off the roof and dug a secret tunnel, reportedly connecting the Oval Office toilet to the Roosevelt -built bunker under the East Wing.Throughout the 20th century, every single bit of the White House, except for the exterior walls, was built new or replaced.It's the White House of Theseus.

President after president had poured millions of dollars into improving the security and functionality of the building.But one particular crisis proved that after all that investment, the White House was still entirely inadequate.

The very heart of U .S.democracy at the State Department.

Can't you just move back so I can go there?

On September 11th, 2001, Washington DC was in chaos following the terror attack on the Pentagon.

Just after 9 .30 on a warm autumn day, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 plunged out of a bright blue sky into the northwest corner of the giant five -sided building.

It was a real severe intention is what it had to it.

You could tell it was like a suicide bomber.

President George W. Bush was in Florida at the time, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his office in the West Wing discussing the situation at the World Trade Center in New York with his aides.

All of a sudden the door burst open and my lead Secret Service agent came in.and came over to the desk where I was sitting and he said, sir, we have to leave immediately.Put one hand on the back of my belt and one hand on my shoulder, literally propelled me out of my office.

Cheney was propelled down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC.Which was a fancy modern term for that bunker built by Franklin Roosevelt under the East Wing in 1942.The Secret Service genuinely thought that a plane was about to hit the White House and there was only room in the P .O .C.for a couple dozen people.

So they announced an emergency evacuation of the building to get everyone else out.

The Secret Service, everybody had automatic weapons and they were yelling in bullhorns for the staffers to take off their shoes and run.There's another plane inbound.

White House Dr. Robert Darling was one of the people who made the cut for the bunker.So he was watching on as almost everyone else was evacuated.terror.

Seeing these young professional young men and women who I dealt with on a daily basis sprinting for their very lives to get off the White House complex to save their life because supposedly there was another plane inbound was a really a surreal moment for me.

Now, for obvious reasons, no one knew if the PEOC could withstand getting hit with a Boeing 757.It's not one of those things that you can easily test.But what everyone did know was that the bunker was woefully inadequate.Pipes hung from the ceiling.The communication systems were archaic.As more officials began to cram into the bunker to talk to Cheney, the air supply system began to struggle.

CO2 levels began spiking.The room began to heat up.By the time President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush arrived, it was getting unpleasant.

When we reached the piyak, I saw the outline of a military sergeant unfolding the ancient hideaway bed and putting on some sheets.

She said the bed looked like it hadn't been updated since FDR's presidency.President Bush said he would be sleeping upstairs.Thank you very much.He had said, you know, we're going to sleep upstairs in the bedroom, but if you need to, It's unclear how deep this bunker was, that kind of thing is classified, but it's clearly not that deep.On 9 -11, nobody who went to the PEOC even used a lift.But perhaps the biggest problem with the PEOC's design was if the White House was actually hit by a plane, there was no way out, no escape tunnel.

The Army Corps of Engineers at a nearby military base were put on alert in case they needed to come and dig White House officials out from the rubble -covered bunker.Cheney emerged from the experience, convinced that something needed to be done.The facility wasn't up to scratch.A week later, the U .S.S.

Congress approved a law that transferred $40 billion to an emergency response fund, which the White House could spend on whatever it wanted, as long as it was connected to responding to, preparing for or preventing terrorist attacks.A decade later, construction equipment arrived on the North Lawn of the White House.It's an expanding zone of banging and digging, heavy equipment, earth moving and concrete pouring.Workers began excavating a massive area of lawn right between the White House press briefing room and where the TV reporters set up for their live shots.

I don't take just one, two, but three steps to clear this eight foot fence behind me so you can see the White House when we do our stories.

Reporters were understandably intrigued by the by what all this was about.

But the scale of the work seemed to indicate that this wasn't just a routine utility upgrade.

The secrecy of the work was notable.they won't talk details.They've told workers not to talk either, even ordering subcontractors to keep their identities secret.

Mark Smith from the Associated Press didn't believe the official story about this just being for utilities.

Those of us who work here saw was tons of steel I -beams going in and truckload after truckload of concrete being poured into this big hole.Whatever was built goes multiple stories deep into the ground.

See the problem with building a secret underground facility to protect the president from attacks is you have to do it secretly.Any information about any security facility could be used to identify a vulnerability.The depth, the thickness of the concrete, how the air and water supply works.The PEOC has been under the east wing for 80 years and we still don't know how deep it is.We're also still not entirely sure what the hole under the North Lawn was all about.What we do know is it was only part of what the government planned to do.

At the time CNN interviewed the project manager Bob Peck in 2011, he was described as overseeing the massive makeover of the East and West Wings.The hole under the West Wing reportedly only cost $86 million out of a reported total of $376 million.The rest of the work, presumably to the East Wing, was left for someone else to finish.The thing is, through 2011 and 2012, there wasn't all that much pushback from the media or public about what exactly was happening with this very costly underground work.Apart from this line of questioning from CNN to the project manager, Bob Peck.

Some would say, really, why would you spend that kind of money simply on a makeover for the White House when there's so many folks who are not doing well?

It doesn't do a whole lot of good to have a building that's sort of the image of the free world standing up there and not functioning well.

And most Americans seemed to agree, or at least didn't care.And that's because this was all happening during what we like to call on this show, the normal times.Before the collapse of traditional norms, verifiable facts and rational decisions drove us into the jungle times we're living in now.This story about the enormous amount of work going on in the junglethe North Lawn of the White House was kind of a last thing before the weather news story.It wasn't a massive deal.

There wasn't much of a conspiracy theory back then, but now everything's a conspiracy theory.Donald Trump didn't start the process of destroying faith in institutions, but he was the piano whose weight cracked through the rotten floor.

We were getting ready to win this election.Frankly, we did win this election.

Trump's lies tend to be about creating holes that he can fill with misinformation.When he says something like...Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?He's creating a hole in the public record which needs to be filled.He has done this for years.

She deleted 33 ,000 emails to keep them out of the hands of the authorities and the American public.And then she went to great lengths to hide, delete, destroy and lie about the evidence.

And every one of those holes he fills up with allegations of corruption.

She created a private illegal email server.in order to hide her corrupt dealings.

Trump says that nobody can be trusted and spent years pushing the idea that Washington was nothing but a swamp of bureaucrats that needed to be drained.

Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.

But when he was elected, there was no way to turn this distrust off.And it turns out, deep, endemic mistrust in the government can save lives.when you are the one running the government.

are wondering, scratching their heads and asking, what the hell is Donald Trump hiding?

What is Donald Trump hiding?What are you hiding?

Of course, Trump didn't help the situation when he was so unwilling to answer questions about his own affairs.When the FBI tried to look into his dealings with Russia, he fired the FBI director.When people asked to look at his tax returns, he wouldn't release them.

People don't understand tax returns.

When people demanded that he release information about his former best friend Jeffrey Epstein, he tried his best to keep that information hidden.

I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody.Really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going.

Trump's habit of constantly making accusations against others while keeping secrets about himself makes everything he does seem suspect.The world is now full of metaphorical holes, which are increasingly filled with nonsense.Which brings us to the actual hole that Trump is creating on the grounds of the White House.The Honorable Donald John Trump.When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, all of the structural and security problems we've been talking about with the building were still there.Most of the $376 million worth of work that needed to be done to the White House in the Obama era had not been completed.

The bunker underneath the East Wing still hadn't been updated.It may still have that fold out bed that George and Laura Bush would rather die than sleep in.And it still didn't have that ballroom Trump called David Axelrod about back in 2011.So Donald Trump decided to do something about it.

For a long time, they've wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there's never been a president that was good at ballrooms.I'm really good at building things and we'll get it built quickly and on time.It'll be beautiful.Top, top of the line.

Now, most of the attention has understandably been on the plans for the ballroom and the fact that he has demolished the East Wing to make way for it.Various organisations have tried to stop him from doing this by launching legal challenges.In March 2026, one of those legal challenges led the White House to claim that halting construction on the ballroom would have significant national security implications.Trump, annoyed by the lawsuit, then went out to the media and explained exactly what was really going on here.

massive complex under the ballroom and that's under construction.

See, it changes things a bit.

And the ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what's being built under the military, including from drones and including from any other thing.

Back in the normal times, I can imagine a situation that would go something like this.The president of the United States announces that the east wing of the White House is being demolished to make way for a large complex with national security features.And then once that's done, President says that he and some of his rich friends will fund the rebuilding of the East Wing to include a large ballroom capable of hosting events that can't fit into the East Room.The details of the underground facility are classified, of course, but they are connected to a long term project to upgrade the security of the White House.And I can imagine a situation where most Americans would accept that explanation in the normal times, notthe jungle times.

Now, nobody believes what the president says.Most people seem to hate the ballroom, seeing it as an extravagance, a vanity project.It is driving an unpopular president's popularity even lower.Think that the whole idea isn't as horrifying as some of his critics are saying it is.In fact, I think there's far more concerning things that we should be paying more attention to.Things that Donald Trump isn't hiding under a ballroom.

Things that he's doing right out in the open.And that story's next on If You're Listening.

Isn't that the famous Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington?

That's right.That's the oldest thing in the White House.The only thing that was here since the very beginning.