He walked Xi through the site the day before he took Xi to see the Constitution.
Trump has a name for the ballroom rising where the East Wing stood — $400 million by his count, $600 million by his contractor’s, half of that from taxpayers. He calls it the Great Hall of the United States. Mao built the original on Tiananmen Square, and Xi has used that China’s legislature never has to matter.
On Thursday, Trump walked Xi Jinping across the South Lawn to see it. He showed him the new helipad and pointed at the ballroom site beyond it. Xi, Trump told reporters, “is an expert on stone… and he loves good granite.” The New York Times reported Xi kept his face blank. Trump handed Xi an eagle statue.
Sikorsky, the Lockheed Martin company that builds Marine One, paid $5 million to $6 million for that helipad. Trump had it cut from California black granite with the presidential seal inlaid in white, signed one slab — his signature hides on the back of the eagle’s head — then two months in ordered it relaid level as a patio for parties. Crews worked around the clock, about $875,000 extra, to finish it for Xi
The day Xi landed, the Washington Post published the drawings. James McCrery II, the first architect, walked away last October after warning that Trump’s design had too few emergency exits and no way to stop a kitchen fire spreading into a room full of guests. Trump answered the warnings with a black Sharpie. He drew the ballroom bigger. He struck out service corridors and stairs. The marked-up sheets went into a box labeled “Docs bearing POTUS’s mark.” When McCrery raised the building codes, Trump told him none applied at the White House. “I am the code,” he said.
Today Trump takes Xi to the National Archives himself, to show him, he said, “some of the greatest treasures of that proud history” — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Xi will stand in front of the page that hands the power to spend and build to Congress — and a federal appeals court has already told Trump what that page means for this ballroom.
Trump rolled out the red carpet twice and the armed forces everywhere else. On Wednesday he waited on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews at the foot of a 100-foot red carpet — the width of his helipad — while troops knelt to smooth it before Xi stepped down; CBS called a president greeting a leader planeside rare. On Thursday morning he lined the South Drive with up to 479 service members and sent a B-2 and four F-22s overhead. That night Xi walked a second red carpet into the North Portico, lined with service members.
Trump had dined in the Great Hall of the People in May, on his state visit. “This is a very large hall, but we’re going to top it,” he said.
The room Trump is copying went up in ten months in 1959 to seat the National People’s Congress, and it still does. Nearly 3,000 delegates fill it once a year to vote on what the Politburo already decided. In 2018 the delegates voted 2,958 to 2 to let Xi rule for life.
