Jon Stewart ripped President Donald Trump for the disastrous design flaws in his notorious White House ballroom project.
The project, which has proven overwhelmingly unpopular with Americans, is expected to cost $400 million. To make space for the ballroom, Trump ordered the total destruction of the White House’s historic East Wing in October.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the markups for the ballroom reveal an oversized porch, “fake windows on the north side,” and columns that would “block” the “interior ballroom view.”
The most baffling issue is that the grand staircase doesn’t seem to lead to an entrance.
Stewart sarcastically defended the mistake in his Monday monologue.
“Oh, OK, woke New York Times. When MC Escher does that, it’s art," Stewart quipped, in a parody of a MAGA pundit. He showed Escher’s famous 1953 painting Relativity, which depicts a room filled with crisscrossing staircases headed in gravity-defying directions.
Stewart joked, “Oh, but you put it on an actual building, and suddenly it’s, ‘This doesn’t make any sense!’ And, ‘I appear to be trapped!’“
The glaring mistakes in the markups for Trump’s ballroom likely could’ve been avoided if the project hadn’t been rushed.
“The hurried reviews,” the Times reported, “are an abrupt departure from how new monuments, museums and even modest renovations have been designed and refined in the capital for decades. And the ballroom will be worse off for it, architects warn.”
Hours after the Times report, Trump spoke to the press aboard Air Force One about his ballroom, holding large placards of its planned design.
Trump told reporters, “I’m fighting wars and other things, but this is very important because this is going to be with us for a long time, and I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”
Stewart criticized Trump for being more energized about his 90,000-square-foot ballroom than about the war he started in Iran.
“For the ballroom, Trump will pull an all-nighter for a point-by-point rebuttal,” Stewart said. “For the war, [he] literally doesn’t have the focus to answer one question.”
Stewart described the placard Trump held at the meeting as his “emotional support ballroom picture.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s ballroom plans on Sunday and criticized the authors of the Times article for having “never built anything” themselves.
“President Trump and his lead architect have built world-class buildings around the world,” Leavitt wrote, “And they are ensuring the People’s House finally has a beautiful ballroom that’s been needed for decades — at no expense to the taxpayer.”
The National Capital Planning Commission will take a final vote on the ballroom on April 2. The Commission, filled with Trump loyalists, is expected to approve the project.
The Times noted that the vote is a “combined preliminary and final review, a move more common for antenna replacements or new security bollards.”
The project’s estimated completion date is January 2029, the final month of Trump’s second term.
