Amanda Marcotte, a senior contributor at Salon, writes with total certainty about a process she clearly does not understand. In her latest piece, she declares Donald Trump’s White House ballroom doomed, not because the project is unworkable, but because the early stages offend her sense of order.

She presents normal features of large scale construction as proof of collapse. Plans change, costs rise, architects get replaced, and approvals lag. That is true in Washington and in ordinary home construction alike. Marcotte treats each step as a scandal rather than acknowledging that this is simply how building works, especially on projects tangled in historic preservation rules and federal oversight.

A White House ballroom was never going to resemble a suburban home renovation. Any structure built on or near the White House complex must pass through layers of review involving historic preservation rules, planning commissions, legal challenges, and political scrutiny. Even preliminary work triggers lawsuits and injunctions. Marcotte ignores that reality entirely, choosing instead to portray bureaucracy as personal incompetence.

Democrats are just mad about “Trump’s White House Ballroom” because they can’t hire 300 friends as unneeded consultants and middlemen plus 3000 of their union friends, of which 1500 would sit on their asses or not show up, implement 10000 kickback schemes, and launder money for… https://t.co/1R3by1VOTS pic.twitter.com/XqmkowbP9m

— Kristi L. Talmadge (@KristiTalmadge) December 17, 2025

Marcotte’s problem, shared by many of her ilk, is not construction. It is patience. Trump has three more years, and the waiting appears unbearable.

At that point, the ballroom almost stops mattering.

Marcotte’s writing has gone plug-and-play. The routine does not change because it does not need to. Another day, another Trump target, and the same conclusions snap into place with very little effort.

There is no proportional response requirement when Trump is involved. Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently called him worse than Islamic terrorists, and no one in her party thought that comparison demanded an intervention. In that context, declaring a ballroom an existential crisis feels almost restrained.

The piece is not really about feasibility or timelines. It is about positioning. In progressive media, being first to declare Trump’s latest move illegitimate, doomed, or historically evil functions as a form of credentialing. The louder the condemnation, the safer the standing.

The ballroom is just the current placeholder. It could have been anything. A podium. A portrait. A name change. The Kennedy Center. Pick a noun. The response would land in the same place because it always does.

Trump does not even need to finish the sentence. He says a thing out loud and the outrage assembles itself, complete with conclusions that arrive early and facts that trail behind, if they appear at all.

This stops feeling urgent and starts feeling convenient. It reads like one of those days when it was Marcotte’s turn to file something, the news cycle wasn’t cooperating, and the ballroom was still sitting there as an easy target.

When you can’t take the winning, you grab whatever is handy.

I don’t know who these people are, but they’re on The Daily Show, so someone clearly thinks this counts as comedy. I’m using the clip as an example of the Trump Derangement Syndrome still floating around. This is their 2025 recap, which looks a lot like every other year Trump has existed.

This is the modern formula. Pick a Trump noun, act horrified, call it a threat to democracy, and congratulate yourself for doing satire.

And when the news cycle runs thin, they don’t stop. They rummage around for leftovers and heat them up again. That is how you end up with ballroom think pieces, Kennedy Center meltdowns, and end of year recaps that sound like a support group for people who can’t accept that Trump keeps winning.

That is why the ballroom keeps reappearing. It is safer than grappling with policy and far less risky than acknowledging that Trump continues to survive the collapse narratives written about him.

Another day, another Trump target. He does something, anything, and the response snaps into place. It gets labeled tacky, declared doomed, and stretched into proof of some larger national failure. The details barely matter because they are interchangeable. Marcotte is not doing something unique here. She is doing what progressive media now does by reflex.

Feature Image: BDEngler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons/edited in Canva Pro