In a surreal display after a historic streak of Republican losses in midterm elections, President Donald Trump’s first public appearance was not to address the results, but instead was on the bare floor of his under-construction White House ballroom.
Trump — following blowout GOP losses and Democratic victories that will see his opposing party winning both chambers of Congress — retreated to what he called his “safest” space in Washington, D.C.
There, the president rambled to an assembled crowd of administration officials and construction workers about his multi-million dollar ballroom project while microphone feedback repeatedly screeched into the public address system. He then signed a steel beam alongside the signatures of workers who helped build the project, adding the word “Love” with an exclamation point above his Sharpie-inked name.
“This is the safest place in Washington,” Trump said. “It’s good for me. It’s relaxing.”
He did not mention election results as he spoke about the ballroom, uninterrupted, for more than 15 minutes.
“Our country is more successful now than at any time in its history — watch that beam go up,” Trump said.
“I grew up with you,” he told the crowd at one point. “Maybe in a different form, maybe genetically, maybe it was your fathers or your mothers, but I grew up with construction sites.”
After he demolished the East Wing of the White House, the former real estate mogul envisioned an ornate White House ballroom stuffed with gold finishes and marble floors to replace it. But court filings over the last several months have detailed what officials called “top secret” designs that revealed the primary purpose of the 90,000-square-foot, heavily fortified and militarized ballroom project.
The ballroom is “a knitted, unified, cohesive part of the East Wing Project, which is vital for National Security, and is being constructed to ensure that the President can perform his constitutional duties in a safe and heavily secured facility,” government lawyers wrote in court documents this summer.
When completed, it will include “heavy steel, drone-proof roof, missile-resistant and drone-proof columns, bullet, ballistic, and blast-proof glass, Military-grade venting for air conditioning and heating” as well as “bomb shelters, a state-of-the-art hospital and medical facilities, Top Secret military installations, structures, and equipment, protective partitioning, and other features,” according to the Department of Justice.
Costs for the project have exploded from an initial $200 million estimate to as much as $600 million, half of which is likely to be paid with public funds. Combined with his other renovation projects, the president has spent or plans to spend more than $1.65 billion in taxpayer dollars throughout the capital.
“You could put as many helicopters as you want on the roof,” Trump said from the construction site on Wednesday.
“It’s a very powerful ceiling. It's drone-proof, it’s missile-proof, it’s bullet-proof,” he said. “No drone can pierce it, no bullet can pierce it, not matter how big.”
Trump delivered a closing campaign message Monday afternoon from his recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which already appears to be cracking and peeling again despite millions of taxpayer dollars pumped into the renovation and the repairs to fix the “botched” new construction.
After spending a late Tuesday night watching election results, the president did not have any public events scheduled for the day after.
White House officials appeared to have abruptly called the press pool to the ballroom site for the president’s presentation and remarks.
Trump’s first morning-after reaction to massive Democratic victories in midterm elections saw him revisiting some of his favorite headlines.
The president posted images from a print edition of The New York Post’s that included a story hailing the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” and his strongman, military-driven foreign policy dominating the Western Hemisphere by killing hundreds of people accused of trafficking drugs and launching a military operation to arrest Venezuela’s ousted leader Nicolàs Maduro.
It was Trump’s first post to his social media platform after election night, which also saw him call into Fox News to muse about the results after he complained about the network’s coverage.
The Post’s story, featuring a date of November 4, 2026, was published Tuesday. Today’s front page features a cartoon of the president drowning under a “blue tsunami” in an image inspired by The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Trump has repeatedly distance himself from Tuesday’s losses, claiming that his party would have fared better if his name was on the ballot. “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday evening.
He said the same to reporters from inside the ballroom site on Wednesday. Asked whether he had any regrets about the way he closed out the campaign, Trump said “no.”
“If I were on the ballot,” he said, “we would have won.”
The president told reporters that Republicans “couldn't transfer the love” on display during a final blitz of campaign rallies for struggling candidates.
“There was such love at those rallies. It was incredible. We weren't able to transfer the love to candidates,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance conceded on Wednesday morning that “the reason we lost is the war” in Iran.
“I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit in the short term,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
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