Donald Trump Just Rushed a Last-Minute White House Project to Impress King Charles
From hand-picked granite slabs to an unbuilt ballroom, the preparations have been as loud as the President overseeing them.
Donald Trump has been preparing for King Charles's arrival and has gone all out. Ahead of the King's visit to the other side of the pond, the President ordered a walkway along the West Wing's colonnade to be hurriedly redone in time for Charles and Queen Camilla to walk down it on Monday. Trump not only approved the project, but he reportedly picked out the granite slabs himself. The new path, a dark charcoal granite sourced from Africa and carved in Italy, replaces the beige Tennessee flagstone that had lined the route since the early 1940s.
And in true Trump fashion, he announced all of this in the middle of a press conference about drug pricing. "If you look outside, so we had flooring outside, we had slate, and it's coming to pieces. It's been there since the early 1940s, and it's a path to the Oval Office, it's a path to the West Wing, it was terrible," he said, before continuing, "We're putting magnificent new granite, it's called charcoal. It's black granite against the white, beautiful white walls. We've stripped all the paint off; it had 200 years of paint, and we've redone it, and it's beautiful, and you can see the building, but you can also see the columns and everything else."
When the conversation eventually turned to the state visit itself, Trump was equally enthusiastic, even if briefly, saying, "We're having King Charles come, he's a friend of mine, we're really looking forward to it, we've spoken, we're going to have a great time," he said before coming back to the topic of the press conference.
Trump's proposed White House ballroom, a project that has attracted both controversy and legal challenges, is not yet built — and he made clear he felt its absence keenly. "I tell you, if I had that ballroom built, it would be full — I wish we had more seats," he said. "They wanted a new ballroom for 150 years, and now they're getting the best in the world, we're gonna have the best in the world. You know, we have a little room that's not big enough to handle what would be a big crowd, but we're going to have great people who love the UK. I love the UK."
The colonnade and the ballroom are not the only projects Trump has been pushing to completion ahead of the royal visit. He has also reportedly taken a personal interest in getting Lafayette Park reopened in time.
It is worth noting that Charles and Camilla's decision to proceed with the visit did not come without some recalibration. In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, the royal couple made minor adjustments to their schedule and engagements before confirming they would go ahead as planned. That they chose to show up regardless says something, and it gives Trump's frantic last-minute renovations a context that makes them feel, if nothing else, like a genuine effort to return the gesture.
