The national capital already has a bigger, more beautiful ballroom than the $400 million one that President Donald Trump is seeking to build at the White House.
The existing Great Hall at the 144-year-old National Building Museum is 36,636 square feet and its ceiling rises from 75 feet by the entrance to 159 feet under the atrium. Trump’s Grand Ballroom is at most 25,000 square feet, with a 40-foot ceiling.
The magnificence of the Great Hall was on display in the Amazon documentary Melania, which features an extended scene of the candlelight dinner the first lady held there last year on the night before her husband’s second inauguration.
“We wanted to create something special,” she narrates from a sea of splendor. “It’s so powerful to see this room come to life tonight. Candlelight, black ties, and my complete creative vision filled with the elegance and sophistication of our donors.”
She already knew the hall from the Armed Forces Ball at the first Trump inauguration. She and the newly elected Trump danced that night, just the two of them in a spotlight at the center of a huge Presidential Seal.
At both of the inaugural events and several other gatherings that Trump attended at the National Building Museum, the Secret Service was able to provide security that precluded assassination attempts, such as at a 2025 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner at the Washington Hilton. The Museum of Building’s Great Hall is 6,636 square feet bigger as well as more easily secured, and Trump could have simply suggested the interrupted WHCA dinner be held there in the near future. He instead used the shooting as an excuse to clamor for a federal judge to lift a stay on construction of the White House ballroom.
The existing bigger, more beautiful ballroom is also more historically significant. It should have a particular appeal for Trump because it is the same venue where Hillary Clinton formally withdrew from the 2008 presidential race.
But he has expressed disapproval of the National Building Museum ballroom, complaining that its 75-foot Corinthian columns blocked his view.
“This is a hell of a big room,” Trump said while addressing a 2017 Republican fundraiser there. “That’s far back. Can you see over there? See, I would’ve gotten rid of these columns.”
Never mind that the generally grandiose Trump had himself installed Corinthian columns–albeit much smaller–in his Trump Tower apartment. The much larger ones–the world’s biggest inside a structure–at the National Building Museum are all the more startling because the box-like exterior of this building of 15.5 million bricks is so simple. It has been compared to a gigantic barn and it is possible to walk past it barely noticing it amid the dramatic architectural icons in the capital.
The only adornment on the exterior of the National Building Museum is a 1,200-foot wrap-around stone frieze depicting soldiers and soldiers returning home after the Civil War. The figures are consistent with the original construction of The Pension Building, where disability and retirement benefits were allocated and disbursed to veterans.
The builder was Union Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, a West Point graduate who served as the U.S. Quartermaster General. The section of the frieze over the building’s west entrance depicts a quartermaster wagon, but where a Trump-like progenitor would have had a likeness of himself at the reins, Miegs made sure to have a freed slave.
The structure became the nonprofit National Building Museum after the pension operation grew into the multi-branch Department of Veterans Affairs. But the effect is the same when present-day visitors pass under that figure set into the otherwise plain brick. They suddenly find themselves in a monumental space, an experience much like democracy itself, built of everyday people around noble principles that eschew facade.
The plain yet thrilling Pension Building was built on budget with locally obtained materials–no Italian Marble–though its roof was not quite complete when it opened in 1895 for President Grover Cleveland’s inaugural ball. A temporary canvas cover sewn by sailmakers at the Navy Yard hung over the 9,000 celebrants as John Philip Sousa’s band played.
Nine more inaugural balls were held there over the ensuing years. The Topeka Capital-Journal described President William Taft’s in 1909:
“In the vast hall of the Pension Building resembling a dream of fairyland mingled fair women, beautifully gowned and from every climes; men whose names are now in every corner of the world; diplomats in court raiment statesmen in somber attire and officers of the army and navy in their gorgeous uniformes, and ordinary American citizens whose presence testified to the democracy of the affair.”
A long history of such moments in a venue that has democracy in its very bricks and originally served veterans seems to be exactly the ballroom our nation’s capital needs. And it can certainly be made more secure than many events Trump attends. That includes the UFC championship at the Kaseya Center in Miami on April 10, where he strode weaving among a crowd of 19,000 two days after the White House announced he would be there.
The Building Museum is the perfect ballroom for the nation’s capital. It is adjacent to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, whose walls bear the names of more than 20,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, beginning in 1791.
Anybody who is tempted to name the former Pension Building after himself should gaze up at the frieze over the west entrance, where the soldier at the reins of a supply wagon is not a quartermaster turned builder, but a freed slave.
