Trump Offers Explosive New Reason Why He Needs a Ballroom

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS First, he announced a ballroom to upgrade the White House event space.

Then, he revealed the ballroom was really just a facade for the military facility he was quietly building below.

And now Donald Trump has admitted what some have long suspected: that the 80-year-old billionaire is also constructing a series of bomb shelters underneath the so-called “People’s House” to protect an elite few.

Days before the Supreme Court rules on whether the project can go ahead, the president took reporters on an impromptu tour of the White House grounds on Wednesday to show off progress on his latest vanity project: a new granite helipad on the South Lawn.

For more than 20 minutes, the president boasted about his renovation skills, talked up the beauty of the ballroom and waxed lyrical about the different types of stone he was using for the new helipad.

But as he led reporters across the construction site, the president also acknowledged that special guests of the White House would soon be able to enjoy cocktails on the South Lawn before using his brand-new event space—and potentially even its bomb shelters.

“They get out of the car and they walk down this path... and they can have cocktails and everything outside of the White House, and then they go into the ballroom.

Even the military, they can use it like that,” Trump told reporters.

“The ballroom is so much a military component with the drones and the bomb shelters and everything else that we have in there.” The tour is believed to be the first time Trump has touted the development of “bomb shelters” as part of his ever-expanding vanity project.

The ballroom began as a modest event-space renovation costing an estimated $200 million, but has since morphed into something much larger, with a price tag of about $400 million and counting.

Trump admitted on Wednesday that he initially wanted to keep the military components and bomb shelters a secret, and had even warned the group suing him over the ballroom that it would result in the public learning too much.

But now that the details are out in the open, he insisted the project was necessary.

“Before we started work, the military came to see me, and they said, ‘Sir, we have an opportunity to do something incredible here, and we’ve been trying to do it for 100 years, but we’ve never had an opportunity like that.’ So I had to make that decision.

I said, “Look, go ahead, design what you want,” he told reporters.