An Oct. 23 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh kicked off with a defense of President Trump’s massive ballroom:
President Donald Trump announced months ago that he had organized a program to design and build a huge ballroom on the campus of the White House in Washington.
The federal facilities there never have had a place to deliver state banquets for more than a few dozen, and the new program, in replacement of the 1940s-era East Wing, will seat hundreds.
Further, Trump has organized private donors to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars, saving taxpayers a lot.
Unruh then played whataboutism:
But now the truth is being delivered.
For example, Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said this project, unlike the Nixon bowling alley, Obama basketball court and the like, will benefit future presidents and even the public.
“A lot of Americans will be able to enjoy that ballroom. A lot of Americans could not enjoy Obama’s basketball court, or Clinton’s running track and putting green, or Gerald Ford’s swimming pool. You know, a lot of Americans couldn’t enjoy those things, but a lot of Americans will be able to enjoy the ballroom,” Shirley told Washington Secrets.
[…]A report at Fox said the Trump administration had launched a trolling campaign against critics.
The White House website, for instance, was detailing “major events timeline” at the site that dates to 1791, when it first was launched.
“The timeline includes a series of benchmarks such as the addition of the north portico from 1829 to 1830, and the addition of the Oval Office in 1909 under the Taft administration and the ‘total reconstruction’ of the White House interior under the Truman administration,” the report said.
It also includes “Cocaine Discovered” in 2023 during the Joe Biden administration.
There also was Obama’s $376 million project on the White House grounds, to which leftists did not raise objections.
The timeline also included Bill Clinton’s 1998 sex scandal with intern Monica Lewinsky, as well as Obama’s invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House.
It was Joe Biden who used the facility for “International Transgender Day of Visibility.”
The twice-failed Democrat candidate for the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton, said, “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
Karoline Leavitt, White House spokeswoman, added more details to the history: “Nearly every single president who’s lived in this beautiful White House behind me has made modernizations and renovations of their own.”
We don’t recall such scandals being documented about Republican presidents. it could be that Trump is actively censoring such things.
The next day, an anonymously written article served up more excuse-making and whataboutism:
The first lawsuit has been filed, by a Virginia couple, over President Donald Trump’s plan to gift the American people a badly needed $300 million ballroom, to be used for state dinners and the like, at the White House complex by replacing the East Wing.
And it’s being done essentially without breaking laws because the White House, and the Supreme Court building and Capitol building are exempt from many standard procedures.
[…]The East Wing’s demolition was begun this week, and leftists in the party erupted with all sorts of snark, but most entirely ignored the previous destruction and construction that other presidents, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, did to the actual White House, not just a wing.
An anonymously written Oct. 29 article served up even more whataboutism:
As President Donald Trump endures ongoing public rage over his demolition of the White House East Wing and plans to erect a huge ballroom in its place, it turns out that a major expansion of the executive mansion has been in the minds of engineers and architects going back to the 19th century.
According to the White House Historical Association, in the mid-1800s concerns arose that the Washington City Canal nearby could affect the president’s health.
“In the summer the stench, insects, and miasmic heat and humidity from stagnant marshes in the environs of the White House was intolerable and considered to be a cause of fevers and waterborne illness,” notes the WHHA.
The solution was to look for land to build a new presidential residence and use the White House for only ceremonial purposes – a plan that never came to fruition due to a lack of funding from Congress.
[…]The more ambitious plans of Col. Bingham were not realized, nor were Mrs. Harrison’s desire for a larger place for dining – something certainly fulfilled in President Trump’s plan for a room large enough to seat 999 guests for dinner, as opposed to a few dozen in the current East Room.
It was not explained why 999 is the ideal number of ballroom guests, or why it was deemed necessary to destroy an entire wing of the White House to justify the project.