A majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that construction can continue on President Trump’s White House ballroom, which also features a secure underground facility. NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez reports.
Page A5From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 1 September 2026
Federal judges report escalating threats, then a court hands Trump a win on his ballroom.
As it ran on the front
Dozens of federal judges are on record now saying the threats against them are getting worse, not better — that's not a talking point, that's a report, filed by the judges themselves. And in the same stretch, the courts that are supposedly independent from all this hand the President a major legal win on his ballroom. You want to know how power protects itself? It doesn't need a conspiracy. It just needs a docket.
Nobody's saying the judges who ruled on the ballroom case are the same judges getting the threats. That's not the point. The point is the system: you build a climate where judges who rule against the guy with a wrecking ball for a personality start getting calls at two in the morning, and you build a climate where the ones who rule for him get called 'sound legal reasoning' on cable news the next day. You don't have to bribe anybody. You just have to make the temperature different depending on which way somebody leans.…
…(cont) And the ballroom — I want to sit with that word for a second. Ballroom. Like this is a wedding venue dispute and not a project tangled up with the President's own money and taste and ego, getting waved through the courts while judges elsewhere are describing, in an actual federal report, threats intensifying against them just for doing the job as written. You don't need a memo that says protect the ballroom, threaten the resisters. The incentives line up on their own, every time, and everybody in the building knows it without anybody having to say it out loud.
This is the trick: they don't have to fix the threats against judges. They don't have to slow anything down. All they have to do is keep winning the cases that matter to them while the report about the threats sits in a drawer somewhere, cited in exactly one news cycle before it's gone. The judges go back to getting the calls. The ballroom goes up. Somebody's going to cut a ribbon on it eventually, and I'll bet you it won't be one of the judges who's been getting threatened for the crime of reading a statute out loud in the wrong direction.
That jury summons sitting in your mailbox next spring comes from the same courts. Worth remembering which cases they had time for.
“You don't need a conspiracy when the incentives already point the same direction: rule for the ballroom, get called a serious jurist; rule against the guy who wants it, and suddenly your family's getting calls at midnight. The report says the threats are getting worse. The docket says the ballroom's going up anyway. Guess which one gets fixed first.”
“The courts ruled strictly on the law, not on any particular ballroom, and any judge facing threats should take that up with whoever's making the threats — that's not really an administration matter. Wait, did I just wave off judicial security? That's not what I meant, judicial security is a top priority for us, moving on quickly now.”
The receipts
One jurist paid to construct a safe room after the floor plan of their home was posted on the internet.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.