
MAGA ANTOINETTE!
A Walmart-sized golden ballroom at the White House. Tax cuts for the rich. Rising prices. Exploding deficits. Welcome to MAGA Antoinette.
- President Donald Trump likes to call his gaudy Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, the “Winter White House.” Now he’s scheming to turn the actual White House into a kind of Summer Mar-a-Lago. Just check out the new patio umbrella tables on the freshly paved-over Rose Garden. What was he doing on the White House roof this week? Quite possibly surveying the site of his new $200 million, 90,000-foot imperial ballroom, fit for Scrooge McDuck or Tsar Nicholas II.
- This ballroom will be twice the size of a football field, excluding the endzones; nearly the size of a Walmart superstore; and almost double the size of the White House itself. Check out Crooked Media’s rendering here. Spoiler: It’s gonna look ridiculous.
- But the ballroom is also the perfect symbol of Trump 2.0’s rampant government waste. Trump swept into power promising radically efficient government, to be realized by Elon Musk’s DOGE cost-cutting operation. Instead, he shuttered cost-effective programs, inflated the deficit, found ways to make the rich even richer, cut programs to help the poor… and now, he’s turning the White House into an imperial staycation spot.
Let’s just count the ways this administration has found to squander public funds, shall we?
- DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, proved… inefficient, to say the least. A top Trump official repeatedly bashed DOGE in a private meeting yesterday. The White House is rehiring hundreds of laid off workers from the National Weather Service. The administration is also paying 154,000 people to stay at home and not work, after accepting Trump’s deferred resignation program.
- Trump officials won’t say how much those salaries cost. But if you do some basic math using the average federal employee salary, the White House is spending over $5.4 billion just to keep these people away. Another estimate puts DOGE’s total waste at $21.7 billion.
- And that’s not the only way to calculate the Trump administration’s inefficiency! Last month, the State Department fired hundreds of foreign service officers. Many were globe-trotting diplomats who worked in embassies and on missions, and spent years studying languages, complex security protocols, and other skillsets. Foreign service officers typically need a security clearance, which can cost upwards of $30,000.
- The government had spent more than 6,000 weeks — or 115 years — teaching foreign languages to nearly 100 diplomats who were fired, according to data crowdsourced by diplomats and shared with What A Day. Will Trump’s solution be to sign a massive contract with Duolingo?
Will Trump’s solution be to sign a massive contract with Duolingo? I wouldn’t doubt it.
Call out: Are you a federal worker who took the deferred resignation? I wanna hear how you’ve been spending your time (and money)! Reach out to me at whataday@crooked.com or on Signal at mattberg.33.
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Related: Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has been barred from training service dogs at her new, cushy detention center, where she has been moved following a secretive meeting with a top Trump official. “We do not allow anyone whose crime involves abuse towards minors or animals — including any crime of a sexual nature,” said Paige Mazzoni, chief executive of Canine Companions. “That’s a hard policy we have, so she will not be able to.” At least someone isn’t breaking the rules in her favor these days.



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