reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0: Trump is not building a ballroom. Andrew Kerr, an architect with over twenty years of federal project experience, posted on Facebook and walked through step by step why this ballroom makes no sense. He did the math: $300,000,000 at 90,000 square feet would be about $3,333 per square foot, and he said that even luxury federal construction doesn’t usually approach $1,000 per square foot. The geometry of the renderings is nearly impossible, showing a building with a 380 by 235 foot footprint, but interior views show maybe 200 by 100 feet, which is 20,000 square feet, so that can’t exist in the same building. Construction drawings look like they were thrown together in about a week, and he suggested they were probably thrown together by Grock, or whoever’s still wandering around the White House from Doge. So the million dollar question is what is he building? The answer, he suggests, is an underground data center.
Think about where they’re building. It’s not random. It’s the East Wing, where the PEOC bunker is, the tunnel systems that connect the White House to the Treasury to other federal buildings, and where all of the secure communications infrastructure lives. That’s prime underground real estate. It reminds me of Larry Ellison’s Oracle data centers in underground Jerusalem: nine stories deep, 160 feet below ground, 460,000 square feet, costing $319,000,000 per bunker. The White House is already at $300,000,000 for this “ballroom,” and it’s only climbing.
Fiscally, it feels like a more apt comparison to those. Outside of architecture anomalies, the fact that this is privately funded should have been the first red flag. This is Donald Trump, the man who has spent taxpayer money on stuff that benefits him. He spent over $3,900,000,000 in taxpayer money just to make over Air Force One. Didn’t he also have Secret Service pay room bills at Mar-a-Lago? This suggests it isn’t serving him; it’s serving someone else specifically.
Look at the donor list: defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, crypto companies like Coinbase, Ripple, and Tether, and telecoms like T-Mobile and Comcast. These aren’t people funding a party space; these are companies with interests in government infrastructure, data, and operations. They’re funding infrastructure that directly serves them. Also, about Larry Ellison’s vision to automate the government: many tech pros talk about automating federal operations or creating a single digital platform for the government, which would require a supremely secure physical home for that system. Placing it directly under the White House would eliminate latency problems and ensure the President has direct physical control over the system’s core. Centralizing control and securing the brain of the government. It’s dystopian in many ways, and these are real developments happening worldwide. The companies funding this are buying access to integrate their systems with how the government operates, and that’s what $300,000,000 will get you. I guess.