President Donald Trump soothes himself after a stressful day in the Oval Office by bending the ear of the construction manager of his massive ballroom project, according to a new report.
Despite the ongoing war in Iran and a resulting surge in fuel prices, as well as backlash to his immigration crackdown and other political problems tanking his approval rating, the 79-year-old president sometimes spends a significant portion of each day discussing his controversial plans to build a $400 ballroom at the White House, reported the Washington Post.
"A division president from Clark Construction, one of the largest construction firms in the region, now works most days out of a trailer on the White House grounds as a high-stakes site manager," the Post reported. "Some evenings the president calls him into the Oval Office to go over details for more than an hour at a time, he recounted to an associate."
Polls show the ballroom is broadly unpopular and faces an ongoing legal challenge from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the case involving the embattled project has been the only one of the hundreds of lawsuits and appeals involving the administration that Trump has personally dictated legal filings.
"Spending time on the ballroom is how Trump likes to unwind at the end of a long workday, a person familiar with the conversations said," the newspaper reported. “'His version of a bourbon is construction,' the person said."
Trump frequently posts on social media about the project, and he defended the $400 million price tag – double his initial projected cost – on Wednesday, saying the increase was necessary because the size of the ballroom has grown, and while the president continues to insist the cost will be covered by private donors, Senate Republican leaders have proposed legislation to provide $1 billion for security enhancements.
The president insisted the ballroom was necessary immediately after a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but support for the project has not significantly changed since then, and Democrats have seized on the issue as an example of Republicans' misplaced priorities.
“This is a layup for Democrats, because we don’t even have to work that hard to highlight the ballroom," wrote Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, in a blog post this week. “Trump can’t shut up about it.”