Stephen Colbert has sounded the alarm on Donald Trump’s “bulls--t” ballroom project as the cost of the president’s pet project spirals.
The Late Show host explained to his audience how Senate Republicans were demanding $1 billion from taxpayers to complete the ballroom, which Trump had repeatedly claimed would be entirely funded by donors.
As the crowd groaned, Colbert, 61, told them, “OK, OK, OK—I know it’s hard to wrap your head around a billion dollars, so let me put that in layman’s terms: that is bulls--t.”
The late-night host censured Trump for backing away from a promise he has consistently made: that the multimillion-dollar venture would cost the American public nothing. The 79-year-old president pledged that his project would be funded privately, by donors and “friends,” but that now looks unlikely to be the case.
Colbert played a series of clips showing that Trump has repeatedly vowed the ballroom would not cost taxpayers a cent.
“I’m paying for it; the country’s not,” Trump said in September. In October, he said the ballroom would be funded “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”
Almost every month, this promise has been made, with the president saying as recently as March that the construction would require “zero taxpayer dollars.”
Colbert had a brutal response.
“How ironic,” he said. “To lie that blatantly takes a lot of balls… and he still hasn’t built the room to store them.”
Trump, meanwhile, appears to believe the ballroom will cost a mere $400 million—double his original estimate.
“The only reason the cost has changed is because, after deep rooted studies, it is approximately twice the size, and a far higher quality, than the original proposal, which would not have been adequate to handle the necessary events, meetings, and even future Inaugurations,” Trump rambled on Truth Social on Wednesday.
“The original price was 200 Million Dollars, the double sized, highest quality completed project will be something less than 400 Million Dollars. It will be magnificent, safe, and secure! This was a necessary change, it was done long ago, but the Fake News failed to report it, trying to make it look like there was a cost overrun. Actually, it is coming in ahead of schedule, and under budget!”
The president is reportedly so desperate for the ballroom to be finished that a division president from D.C.-based construction firm Clark Construction works out of a trailer on the White House grounds as a sort of on-call site manager, according to The Washington Post.
Trump reportedly loves bringing the construction executive into the Oval Office in the evenings to go over project details for more than an hour at a time as a way to relax.
“His version of a bourbon is construction,” a person familiar with the bizarre routine told the Post.
