Donald Trump’s newest White House vanity project is undergoing changes as work continues around the clock to finish construction.
Crews have torn up much of the South Lawn to make way for Trump’s new helipad, but the president has launched additional construction work on the project: changing the slope of the lawn itself.
The helipad is just one of the president’s White House projects, with a combined cost estimated at $927 million, according to the Washington Post. That outlet reported Monday that workers are raising the lawn’s level to bring it flush with the helipad, which Trump wants completed before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit next month.
“The lawn will gently be reshaped to meet the new helipad,” one White House official told the Post.
Photographs of the site also show work on the lawn, which slopes downward toward the National Mall.
The helipad project has also meant work on the South Portico and the White House driveway. The cost, according to contractor’s records seen by the Post, is $13 million—but that was before changes were made to the lawn.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Post or the Daily Beast asking about any additional cost.
Trump, 80, proudly showed the site on Monday to children who participated in a Back to School event in the Rose Garden.
“I love construction,” Trump said, according to GB News editor Tom Harwood. “Kids love construction.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump mentioned the slope of the lawn specifically; pool reports didn’t specify.
Work on the helipad got off to a rocky start earlier this month, with Trump demanding a redo following weeks of around-the-clock work. This involved taking apart the 100-foot-wide presidential seal, engraved in granite. It was then that Trump questioned the need to reslope the lawn, according to the Post.
“We had a lot of slope on it, and I felt it was too much slope,” Trump told reporters last week during a tour of the project.
Meanwhile on the White House grounds, construction of Trump’s controversial ballroom continues—at least temporarily—thanks to a friendly ruling last week by the Supreme Court.
The president’s vanity projects at the White House and in the capital area take up a majority—about 70 percent—of his focus, Trump biographer Maggie Haberman has estimated.
Last October, when the East Wing of the White House was being torn down, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that the ballroom was the president’s “main priority.”
A few months later, he couldn’t help but abruptly get up from a meeting to go look out a window at the construction site.
