Trump Pushes for White House Ballroom After Shooting Attempt

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Within hours after an attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, President Trump declared that the incident showed the need to build a ballroom at the White House without delay. “We need the ballroom,” he told reporters in a press conference. Yesterday morning, he reiterated the argument on Truth Social, adding, “Nothing should be allowed to interfere with with [sic] its construction, which is on budget and substantially ahead of schedule!!!” Many allies leaped to agree. The commentator Meghan McCain wrote on X, “I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House.” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a titular Democrat, cited “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to say, “After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.” And Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche fired off a letter to the attorney for the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the construction, saying that the Justice Department would move to dismiss the case if it wasn’t dropped by 9 a.m. this morning. (It was not.)