Trump’s Ballroom Plan Is About More Than a Building

With oil surging past $4 a gallon as the war in Iran raged on, President Donald Trump gathered reporters around the Resolute Desk on Tuesday afternoon and pulled out pages of notes in his signature Sharpie scrawl.

But it wasn’t the ongoing conflict or market vacillations that had earned handwritten talking points.

Instead, the president was incensed by a federal judge who ruled that construction on a new White House ballroom — which received a rubber-stamp approval from an architecture panel on Thursday — must stop until the project earned congressional approval.

US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office on March 31.

Photographer: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg

The tableau was the latest evidence that ...