The President Toured Reporters Through His New Underground Complex.

The President walked reporters through the construction site on Tuesday.

He told them the new ballroom would extend six stories beneath the existing White House. He told them the roof would be drone-proof, dead flat, “built for military,” and would function as a “drone port” with capacity for an unlimited number of drones. He told them the fence around it could not be knocked over by a bulldozer. He told them the windows would be four inches thick. He told them the underground portion would include a military hospital and research facilities, the purpose of which he did not specify.

He asked, in the same tour, that Congress allocate one billion dollars for security enhancements to the building.

Reuters reported the tour. Steve Holland and Humeyra Pamuk noted the construction footprint of ninety thousand square feet, which would dwarf the existing White House by a considerable margin.

A short history of underground construction at the White House.

There is precedent. The Presidential Emergency Operations Center has existed since World War II. It is small, secret, and was built underground because that is where secret things go. No president has held a press tour of it.

The new complex is different in three respects. It is larger. It is for entertaining. The President is personally narrating its security features to wire reporters in front of a camera.

The inventory, calmly.

A drone port on the roof. A military hospital underground. Research facilities of unspecified purpose. Four-inch glass. Titanium fencing rated against bulldozers. Steel described as impenetrable. Six floors below the ground.

This is not a ballroom. A ballroom has a coat check.

The ask.

Democrats and some Republicans called the funding request extravagant. The Reuters story noted the request comes as Americans deal with rising gasoline prices and other costs from the Iran war.

The President’s argument, on the tour, was that the ballroom needs to host a thousand people at a time. That is a reasonable size for a White House event. It is not, by itself, an argument for any of the rest of it.

The rest of it was the tour.