President Donald Trump stopped at a stone importer while on his vacation to look for marble and onyx for his planned White House ballroom.
The president is still on his Florida holiday vacation before he heads back to Washington and took time to visit Arc Stone and Tile, whose website describes it as “Importers, Distributors, Wholesalers and Italian Marble Specialists.”
Almost immediately, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mocked the window-shopping trip.
“Good to see the President is laser-focused on affordability for the American people!” Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential hopeful, posted on X.
The president has focused heavily on building the White House ballroom, even mentioning the $400 million construction project during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“It's a massive job, and it’s a tiny fraction of that number,” he said. “And we’re under budget and ahead of schedule.”
He also said he hoped that the next presidential inauguration would take place there as opposed to the more traditional setting of the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s... After realizing we’re going to do the inauguration in that building... It’s got all bulletproof glass,” he said. It’s got all drone, they call it drone-free roof. Drones won’t touch it. It’s a big… It’s a big, beautiful, safe building.”
When The Independent asked why the president would choose marble imported from Italy compared to marble from the United States, a White House aide familiar with the matter repeated what it told pool reporters: “President Trump is purchasing marble and onyx, at his own expense, for the White House Ballroom.”
The National Capital Planning Commission will hold its first public hearing about the ballroom on Thursday.
This came after the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit seeking to halt construction because the White House failed to provide plans to the commission and the Commission of Fine Arts for legally-mandated reviews after the White House bulldozed the East Wing to make room for the ballroom.
Court documents showed that the Trump administration said that it would begin construction of the ballroom in April should the commission approve the plans for it.
The White House has said that the ballroom is a matter of national security and has said Trump is constructing the ballroom with private money, including his own, not with federal dollars.
A poll in October showed that only 28 percent of Americans support the demolition of the East Wing to make room for the structure.
The construction of the ballroom is part of many attempts by the president to leave his stamp on Washington, DC.
In addition, he announced that construction would begin on his “Triumphal Arch” in the next two months. Last month, the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attempted to rename the center the Trump-Kennedy Center. But renaming the building would require an act of Congress.
Trump had installed a series of MAGA-friendly supporters on the board who made him the chairman of the center.
-Owen Scott, Josh Marcus and Andrew Feinberg contributed to this report
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