My first reaction to Trump’s Reno Rumble: Whitehouse Edition has been, broadly, aesthetic horror. Gold-framed portraits, gold-framed mirrors, gilded overlays on the walls, even the presidential seal on the ceiling covered in gold leaf. The Rose Garden paved over with stone tiles, yellow and white striped umbrellas mimicking Mar-a-Lago. And now, apparently, a 90,000 square foot ballroom being carved out of the East Wing at a cost exceeding $200 million.
But I've come to think the aesthetics are entirely beside the point.
We’re watching the final stages of a transition that has been underway for decades: the replacement of governance as institutional management with governance as theatrical performance. The ballroom is a symptom of Trump's personal vulgarity, yes; but it's also the logical endpoint of a political system that has given up on the idea that governing means maintaining functional institutions.
The ballroom project will nearly double the White House's footprint. Demolition of part of the East Wing began in late October, just months after the project was announced in July. The Society of Architectural Historians and the American Institute of Architects both raised concerns about the speed and scope of the changes. The Trump administration dismissed these as "manufactured outrage" from "unhinged leftists" and defended the ballroom as "a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations."
The primary function of government, from the perspective of those running it, is no longer to administer programs or maintain institutions; it’s to stage increasingly elaborate demonstrations of power and status.
The ballroom is not being built because there's an actual operational need for it; Trump described it as necessary "to host large events for world leaders," but the White House has hosted better world leaders than any alive today for over two centuries without 90,000 square feet of ballroom.
The new ballroom exists to communicate that this presidency operates at a scale of grandeur that previous presidencies did not.
Physical spaces shape institutional behavior in ways that are easy to overlook. When you build a massive ballroom designed to hold 999 people for formal events, you're creating an incentive structure that reshapes everything around it. Suddenly, there's pressure to fill that ballroom, to use it, to justify its existence. You need events at a scale of pomp and ceremony that matches the space. You need foreign dignitaries who will be impressed by it. You need photo opportunities that showcase it. The building doesn't serve the presidency's existing functions. It creates new functions that serve the building.
And the ballroom doesn't exist in isolation. Each renovation multiplies the effect of the others. The gold frames in the colonnade set expectations for the gold leaf in the Oval Office. The chandeliers in the Cabinet Room prepare visitors for the scale of the ballroom. Every space reinforces the same vocabulary of imperial grandeur, creating a cumulative environment that makes certain behaviors natural and others impossible.
These spaces are designed for cameras first and human occupation second. They exist to be photographed, to communicate visually, to project an image of wealth and power that can be immediately understood in a social media feed or a news broadcast. The Rose Garden isn't a garden anymore in any meaningful sense. The Cabinet Room isn't optimized for productive meetings, it's optimized for the photos taken during those meetings. And the ballroom, when it's finished, will function primarily as a backdrop for diplomatic theater, a space so overwhelming in its opulence that it becomes the story rather than whatever events happen inside it.
This is neither a bug nor a distortion of modern governance. This is what governance has become. When institutions are weak, when bureaucratic capacity is limited, when actual policy implementation is difficult and unglamorous and often unsuccessful, the rational strategy for any political leader is to focus energy on symbolic projects that can be photographed and understood immediately. You can't easily show voters a functioning regulatory apparatus or improved administrative efficiency. You can show them a ballroom.
The Obama administration understood this too. The White House did extensive social media documentation of Obama's daily activities, carefully staged photos of informal moments, visual communication of presidential temperament. The difference was that Obama's staging emphasized competence and restraint rather than opulence. But both approaches share a common recognition: in contemporary politics, governance is primarily about managing perceptions rather than managing institutions.
Trump of course has abandoned even the pretense that the staging is in service of institutional goals. The ballroom is not justified by explaining how it will improve diplomatic outcomes or make government more effective. It's justified by appeals to grandeur for its own sake. The gold leaf in the Oval Office is not explained as projecting American power to foreign visitors. It's just there because Trump likes gold. This honesty, perversely, is clarifying. It shows us what the incentive structure actually rewards: visible demonstrations of wealth and status, not the invisible work of institutional maintenance.
Some preservation specialists noted that the ballroom project bypassed normal review processes. Will Scharf, Trump's staff secretary and chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, said the commission had jurisdiction over construction but not demolition, and would review plans when they were submitted. Edward Lengel, former chief historian of the White House Historical Association, described it as "a big loophole that has always been there. Previous presidents have observed precedent and not tried to exploit that loophole."
This is where I think the institutional decay becomes most visible. It's not that laws are being broken. It's that the informal constraints that made government function are being treated as optional. The normal review process exists because making major changes to the nation's most symbolically important building should involve consultation, deliberation, and consideration of competing values. Bypassing that process sends a signal - about what matters and what doesn't.
Once you start optimizing for spectacle rather than function, the logic becomes self-reinforcing. If the ballroom succeeds in generating positive media coverage and impressing foreign dignitaries, that validates the entire approach. Why spend time on unglamorous institutional reform when you can build something visible and impressive? Why invest in bureaucratic capacity when you can invest in architectural grandeur? The incentive structure tilts further toward performance and away from administration.
I'm not arguing that symbolic politics is new. Obviously every government engages in it to some degree. But there's a difference between using symbols in service of governance and replacing governance with symbols. The former treats spectacle as a tool for building support for institutional projects. The latter treats institutional projects as excuses for spectacle.
We've crossed that line.
Every hour of presidential attention spent on ballroom planning is an hour not spent building administrative capacity. Every signal that grandeur matters more than process is a signal that influences decisions throughout the government. Every time a norm gets bypassed because it's inconvenient, the next norm becomes easier to bypass. And gradually, the entire apparatus of government reorients itself around staging performances rather than managing institutions.
Can this be reversed? I'm honestly not sure. Once the incentive structure tilts far enough toward spectacle, it becomes hard for any individual leader to resist. The voters who elected Trump wanted spectacle. Many of them explicitly rejected candidates who promised competent institutional management in favor of someone who promised to be entertaining and visually impressive. If that's what the political market rewards, why would we expect leaders to optimize for anything else?
There's a deeper problem too. Building institutional capacity is genuinely hard. It takes years of sustained effort, technical expertise, and attention to unglamorous details. The payoff is uncertain and often invisible. Building a ballroom, on the other hand, takes a few months and produces tangible results that everyone can see. If you're a political leader with a limited time horizon and constant pressure to demonstrate achievement, which would you choose?
The ballroom will get built. It will probably be very grand, in a Kardashian / Real Housewives of New York sort of way. In photographs, it will look impressive. Foreign dignitaries will attend events there. The media will document the spectacle. And in the background, the actual machinery of governance will continue to atrophy, its maintenance deferred once again in favor of something more visually striking.
This is what it looks like when a political system completes its transition from governing as institutional management to governing as theatrical production. The ballroom is the system revealing its actual priorities. And those priorities are increasingly about staging power rather than exercising it, about looking impressive rather than functioning effectively, about building monuments rather than maintaining institutions.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ballroom is just a ballroom, and behind the scenes, serious people are doing serious work. But I have seen little evidence in the Trump 2.0 administration to suggest anything approaching competence or good faith. When you build a 90,000 square foot monument to grandeur in the middle of your government headquarters, you're making a statement about what matters. That statement echoes through every other decision, reshaping incentives and priorities in ways that are hard to reverse. The building is the message. And the message is that spectacle has won.
