A Fox News contributor suggested that President Donald Trump should tell federal judges to buzz off and build his ballroom without their blessing.
After U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ordered an immediate halt to Trump’s project on Tuesday, conservative journalist Kaylee McGhee White appeared on Fox News’s Outnumbered on Wednesday and offered her own solution for the president’s tiff with the judicial branch.
“It’s interesting,” White said. “I don’t remember federal judges striking down FDR, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Calvin Coolidge, or Harry Truman, who all made changes to the White House on executive authority.”
White, 28, was born 25 years after the death of Truman, the last of the four presidents she named to die, making it unlikely that she would have any memory of any of them.
“And of course, President Trump is right that this is being funded privately, so Congress does not need to approve the funds. But I’ve got to say, I think he should just continue construction,” she continued. “At a certain point, you’ve got to tell these federal judges to stay in their lane, because this is clearly a ruling made out of spite against the president, and has no basis in legal authority.”
“And maybe if Congress were in town to do their jobs, they’d be able to impeach the judge, but unfortunately, it’s on President Trump.”
Trump, 79, melted down after the federal judge approved the National Trust Preservation Committee’s request for a preliminary injunction.
The nonprofit, which the president called a “Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005,” had accused the president of surpassing his authority to accelerate the $400 million vanity project.
“Congressional approval has never been given on anything, in these circumstances, big or small, having to do with construction at the White House,” the president whined in a post on Truth Social. “In this case, even less so, because the Ballroom is being built with Private Donations, no Federal Taxpayer Money!”
Leon wrote in his decision that the President of the United States is “the steward” of the White House, not “the owner.”
“I have concluded that the National Trust is likely to succeed on the merits because no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” he wrote.
The president complained that the NTPC did not sue the Federal Reserve for its construction, which he said “has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman.”
Trump demolished the White House’s historic East Wing in October to make room for his ballroom, a 90,000-square-foot space that would dwarf the main building of the People’s House by about 35,000 square feet upon its initially expected completion in 2028.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast in a statement: “President Trump clearly has the legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House – just like all of his predecessors did. We will immediately appeal this egregious decision and are confident we will prevail,so that shouldn’t preclude us from advancing the process through committees.”
