WASHINGTON -- President Trump's vision for a White House ballroom stretches back more than a decade. His argument that it is "vital to our national security," which culminated Friday in an appeal to the Supreme Court, is far more recent.
When Trump announced last year that he was demolishing part of the White House to make way for the project, he framed it as a matter of aesthetics and space.
"It will be a great legacy project, and I think it will be special," the president said that July. "I think it will be really beautiful."
Trump on that day and many others said it was unbefitting for a nation of the U.S.'s stature to have to erect temporary tents for large events.
"When it rains, it's a disaster," he said. "And the tent is a hundred yards -- that's more than a football field -- away from the main entrance, and people are schlepping down to the tent. It's not a pretty sight."
Trump raised the ballroom idea in 2010, in a private phone call with David Axelrod, then senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The conversation came in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Trump called to suggest he could help. After Axelrod politely declined, Trump offered to build a White House ballroom.
"They turned it down," Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. "I was going to put up $100 million to build a ballroom at the White House, because having a tent is not that good."
The same year, the Obama White House laughed off the suggestion. "I'm not sure that it would be appropriate to have a shiny gold Trump sign...on any part of the White House," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at the time.
In a signing ceremony shortly after returning to office last year, Trump said he had been rebuffed on the ballroom "three or four times," including during the Biden administration, but joked that he would be more receptive to his own proposal now that he occupied the White House.
"I'm going to try and make the offer to myself, you know? Because we could use a bigger room," he said.
The White House news release on the project, last July, touted the need for "a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests." It said the Secret Service "will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications."
Construction began in September, and the demolition of the East Wing soon followed. The first major legal challenge was filed in mid-December.
An early Justice Department legal submission cited the tent issue and emphasized the president's role as "the sole organ of American foreign policy," requiring him to be able to receive ambassadors and other public ministers in an appropriate setting. "It is entirely fitting, then, that the presidential residence and workplace be equipped for that purpose," the government said. "Given modern needs, the White House is not."
By January, the administration's legal arguments on security were growing, with its lawyers telling a judge that halting the construction project midstream would endanger the safety of the president and others who work in the White House. Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn added in a court declaration that a permanent structure for screening guests and hosting events would "also increase the safety and security of all attendees at those events, including the President and foreign leaders and dignitaries."
In late March, Trump in a press gaggle aboard Air Force One shared renderings of the project and emphasized the security upgrades that he said came at the request of the military.
"They wanted additional security, drone-proof roofing, and reinforced glass," he said. "And unfortunately, we're living in an age where that's a good thing."
Two days later, the U.S. Judge Richard Leon ordered construction of the ballroom to halt above ground, unless and until it was blessed by Congress. The Justice Department quickly appealed, and construction has been allowed to continue in the interim.
Hours after a shooter attempted to break into the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in late April, Trump said the incident underscored why the ballroom was a security necessity. Administration lawyers, meanwhile, that month offered an appeals court an unusually detailed window into national-security planning as part of their bid to save the construction.
More recently, Trump has posted a series of renditions on social media of what purports to be the ballroom's roof, filled with drones, trucks and soldiers.
An appeals court this month said the fact remained that Trump didn't have the legal authority to build the project without congressional approval, adding that the administration didn't make such sweeping security claims earlier in the litigation. Still, the court paused its ruling from taking effect for two weeks to give the White House a chance to go to the Supreme Court.
When the administration did so on Friday, its lawyers cited a string of incidents as proof that "the updated East Wing complex is absolutely required." They included the correspondents' dinner incident, as well as a thwarted plot to attack June's UFC cage-fighting match on the White House lawn and "the threat of a missile attack against Air Force One on July 8."
They also included two events that had occurred before Trump returned to the White House: the July 2024 Butler, Pa., campaign rally when Trump's ear was struck by a sniper's bullet, and a second assassination attempt in September 2024 at Trump International Golf Club in Florida.
In a Friday night social-media post, Trump referred to the ballroom project as a "military complex" and a "desperately needed National Security structure for the people of the United States of America."
Last year, when Fox News's Jesse Watters got time with Trump, the president identified another reason driving his desire.
"He said, 'Jesse, it's a monument,'" Watters told a crowd at a TurningPoint USA event in December. "I'm building a monument to myself, because no one else will."