Vanity Projects All the Way Down

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

You might recall that the Trump Department of Justice filed criminal charges against Jerome Powell for misleading Congress about the costs of a Federal Reserve construction project.

 

The charges were ludicrous and an abuse of power, intended solely to purge Powell as the Fed chair, and the DOJ later dropped the investigation after a judge found no evidence of wrongdoing. But let’s imagine for a moment some pliant judge agreed to go along with the effort. In theory, the administration was looking to put Powell in jail for up to 20 years. Again, I don’t think it was ever possible that he would be convicted. The process itself was the punishment.

 

Well, there’s another construction overrun case in the news these days. The president’s pet project to build the world’s greatest ballroom was initially supposed to cost $200 million, then $400 million. But, the president insisted over and over again, the cost to taxpayers would be zero. There’d be “no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever.” From CNN:

 

“I’m paying for it; the country’s not,” Trump said in September.

 

He added in October that it would be paid for “100% by me and some friends of mine.”

 

In December he said it would be “free of charge.”

 

In February he cited “no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever.”

 

And in March he said it would involve “zero taxpayer dollars.”

 

I’ve searched in vain to find anyone from the administration testifying to Congress repeating this claim. That surprises me—it would be political malpractice for Democrats not to have gotten that on the record under oath. But the Trump DOJ did tell a judge that it would be cost-free to taxpayers. Obviously, it would be stupid to prosecute the lawyer in question for misleading the court. He surely was speaking in good faith at the time. But if cost overruns and false promises about them are criminal offenses according to this administration, it’s at least worth noting the double standard.

 

Now that I’ve done that, I want to make another point.

 

I think the White House ballroom is a pretty good analog to the Iran war. Trump often says that many presidents have wanted a ballroom, but he’s the only one to do it. He’s also said that many of his predecessors wanted to deal with Iran and its nuclear program, but he’s the only one with the courage and the brains to actually do it. As an aide told The Atlantic, “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”

 

In the case of the ballroom, Trump didn’t wait to ask Congress or seek approval from the relevant boards and commissions or the American people. He just sent in the bulldozers and tore down the East Wing. He did say in advance that he’d like to put in a ballroom, but he insisted that it “wouldn’t interfere” with the existing structure. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted, “Nothing will be torn down.” “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it, but not touching it,” he said. “And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”

 

And then he had it torn down.

 

Then came all the assurances it would be paid for by him and donors. But that was before a left-wing idiot tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to shoot Trump. Almost instantaneously, the White House and its allies pushed the argument that the ballroom was now a national security priority. If the WHCD had been in a secure ballroom, the president would have been safe. Of course, the president was safe at the dinner. Security stopped the would-be shooter before he got anywhere near the president. Also, Trump’s planned ballroom would not work as a venue for the WHCD not just because it would conflict with the whole mission of the White House Correspondents’ Association—it hosts the president, the president doesn’t host it—but because it would also be too small for the dinner and the associated parties. But the pretext was too good to pass up. Also, if the DOJ can slap a national security rationale on the construction project, it will let the administration sidestep all sorts of legal hassles for what they had previously said was a purely aesthetic project.

 

Then there’s the Iran War. Trump has said that he thought it would be like the Venezuela operation: quick, decisive, and low-cost. He’d find—or appoint!—an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez to work with the U.S. The estimated time for the war was four to six weeks with a stated goal of regime change, the liberation of the Iranian people, and the complete elimination of the Iranian nuclear program. He even hinted that if things had gone according to plan, he would have worked out a similar “take-the-oil” scheme that would presumably have spared any major expense for the taxpayers. As with Venezuela, he kept Congress at arm’s length. But the Iran War didn’t go like the Venezuela operation (and we still don’t know whether the Venezuela op will ultimately succeed either). Costs are piling up. The Pentagon’s comptroller recently told Congress that the war has cost around $25 billion so far, and the White House is preparing a supplemental request of some $98 billion, down from $200 billion, largely to cover the costs of Operation Epic Fury.

 

In case you don’t see the comparison: Trump does something unilaterally because the gelded Congress lets him, and his biggest fans take it on faith that he knows what he’s doing. Then, when it goes sideways, he demands Congress fix it on the taxpayers’ tab. Admittedly, sometimes he unilaterally creates a mess to solve a problem, then backs down and claims he solved the problem he created. This is the essence of the TACO trade zig-zags. The Iran War is shaping up to borrow from both models. If—and I think it is a huge if—he gets the Strait of Hormuz open he will declare victory and celebrate how only he could have gotten the waterway—which was open before the war—opened. The war is a war, and it is an unauthorized—and arguably illegal—one at that. It started as a vanity project draped in national security arguments (many defensible ones in the abstract), but it will likely end as a “success” because the stock market will go up in response to him cutting simply “ending” the war without achieving his goals.  The ballroom, unauthorized and arguably illegal, started as a developer’s vanity project, but will be declared a success by turning it into a national security project.

 

It’s not over.

 

One quick aside: Yesterday, Marco Rubio, in an admittedly bravura press conference, announced that the war is effectively over. “Operation Epic Fury is concluded,” he said. “We achieved the objective of that operation.”

 

We did? 

 

Iran still has its radioactive “dust.” The regime is still there. The Iranian people are still living under theocratic tyranny.

 

Goalposts are moving so fast they should be on railroad tracks.

 

Again, legal and political considerations are driving a lot of this bait-and-switch. The White House has run out the clock on a war without Congressional approval under the War Powers Act. It’s tried to claim that ceasefires don’t count toward the 60-day time limit. Now it’s claiming that Operation Epic Fury is over, so the War Powers Act doesn’t apply anymore. Look, I think the War Powers Act is messy conceptually and constitutionally. But calling an end to an operation is not the same thing as calling an end to a war. Military operations are subunits of wars. Operation Overlord—i.e., the Normandy invasion—ended long before World War II ended. We are still imposing a naval blockade of Iran. I think that blockade was a good idea strategically, but a naval blockade is an act of war, period. Moreover, Iran is still trying to turn the Strait of Hormuz into a toll lane.

 

The broader pattern.

 

Obviously, the similarities between the two things aren’t exact. One’s a big building. Another is a war that is threatening a global recession. But there’s an emerging pattern. Trump rushes into a vanity project, and when problems arise, he changes the arguments, demands Congress support something after the fact, and encourages supporters to celebrate his genius and question the patriotism or intelligence of his critics.

 

Two examples do not a concrete pattern make, of course. Fortunately, there’s a long list of similar examples. In Trump’s first term, Mexico was going to pay for the wall—which remains unbuilt, by the way. When Mexico didn’t cough up the pesos—why would it?—Trump demanded congressional money, which triggered a 35-day shutdown over $5.7 billion. Then he declared a “national emergency” as a pretext to allow him to spend money on the wall Congress had refused to allocate. 

 

Also, in his first term, Trump levied tariffs on China, claiming that China—not American businesses and consumers—paid those tariffs. When China levied its own tariffs, Trump ran to Congress to bail out farmers with American taxpayer money.

 

DOGE was supposed to deliver $2 trillion, then $1 trillion in savings. Now DOGE claims it saved $215 billion, but independent estimates range from $1 to $7 billion (surely too low) to around $150 billion. And the government is still scrambling to rehire key employees and fix damage done by DOGE. But total federal spending has continued to climb upward. And the national debt is now greater than 100 percent of GDP (you can count on Kevin Williamson to paint that as a rosy number).

 

Many of the things the Trump administration has done have defensible arguments behind them. In theory, I might have been a DOGE guy. I think the arguments for regime change in Iran are still better than the arguments against them. I really have no problem with a nice new ballroom complete with an updated underground secure facility. But the point of going through the traditional political process—making public arguments to rally public support, working with Congress for approval and buy-in—isn’t just some exercise in civic due diligence for diligence’s sake. If the administration had gone before Congress and made the case for Operation Epic Fury, there would arguably have been strategic costs. But given that the initial strategic goals look unlikely to be achieved, so what?

 

Moreover, the administration would have been peppered with questions about the Strait of Hormuz dilemma. Trump waved away those concerns when talking with his coterie of yes-men and disregarded Gen. Dan Caine’s too-restrained warnings as well (Caine is not a yes-man). But having to come up with an argument grounded in something more than Trump’s gut would have made the administration better prepared for the realities of this war. And public and political support would not have been so lacking from the get-go. Likewise, if Trump went through the same process for renovating the East Wing, he might not have gotten everything he wanted, but what he got wouldn’t be a political albatross. There is not a single voter in America—I would happily wager—who is more likely to vote for Republicans or support Trump because of this ballroom mess. But there are surely quite a few who think the economy is souring because he took his eye off the ball and kept it on his precious ballroom.