Trump Says the White House Ballroom is Essential for Security. Does He Have a Point?

President Donald Trump renewed his push for a new White House ballroom after a California man opened fire outside the White House Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, arguing that holding the event at his planned venue would have prevented the incident. 

“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!” Trump said on Truth Social on Sunday. 

Sen. Lindsay Graham backed the plan on Monday, joining two other senators in announcing legislation to ask Congress for $400 million to fund its construction, which has already begun and is expected to include security features. Trump previously promised the ballroom will be privately funded by wealthy donors.  

“We saw Saturday that America has a problem,” Graham told reporters on Monday. “That problem is, it is very difficult to have a bunch of important people in the same place unless it is really, really secure.”  

Democrats have described the ballroom as a “vanity project” and a waste of resources, and its construction was recently blocked by a judge following a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

On Tuesday, a judge denied a Department of Justice request to have the lawsuit dismissed, echoing Trump’s justification of the project as necessary for safety reasons. 

“This Court should never have enjoined this Project, but now, after the Saturday night attempted assassination, which could have never taken place in the new facility, reasonable minds can no longer differ — The injunction must be dissolved,” the Administration wrote. 

But the incident has sparked renewed debate over the logistical and security challenges of hosting major diplomatic and presidential events at hotels in Washington, D.C. In addition to the annual WHCA dinner, D.C. hotels host the National Prayer Breakfast, the Gridiron Dinner, and hundreds of foreign diplomats every year. 

Security experts who spoke to TIME said hosting these events in hotels presents unique security challenges, and that a space within the White House grounds for presidential events is not without merit. 

“I think it's pretty obvious to me that having an event at the White House is always going to be safer than putting it anywhere else,” says Jason Russell, former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent. 

Russell, who has conducted security operations at the Washington Hilton ballroom where Trump attended the dinner, said the most difficult part of protecting the president in a hotel building is minimizing the impact on the hotel guests while maintaining a secure perimeter.

“There's this little bit of a push and pull where we want to inconvenience people as little as possible to host these events,” Russell says. “So we try to do what we can to be secure, but we also don't want to close down the three city blocks.

According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, 31-year-old suspect Cole Tomas Allen, who is charged with attempted assassination of the president, had checked into a hotel room the day before the hotel was to host the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. For an agency under the Department of Homeland Security facing budgetary constraints due to a partial government shutdown, the Secret Service is financially constrained from searching every guest’s room before the event, which could also raise legal questions about Fourth Amendment violations. 

“They don't go room to room, and they don't certainly eliminate the Fourth Amendment of unreasonable search and seizure on people to just check everybody, all the place, all the time, ” Michael de Geus, former Special Agent and CEO of security firm Shadow, says, noting that most hotels in the U.S. don’t have bag screenings prior to checking in their guests. 

On March 30, 1981, former President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton hotel after a speaking engagement. Hinkley Jr. had penetrated two of three layers of protection set up by the Secret Service. 

Forty-five years later, the security protection has evolved dramatically, former agents say. 

“Comparing 1981 to 2026 is kind of comparing apples and oranges,” Derek Mayer, former Secret Service Deputy Special Agent, says. “Hinckley just showed up like he was part of the press, and people who were able to get that close to President Reagan were not screened.”

Mayer explains that the Secret Service usually employs a three-tiered protection method to screen the event attendees, with each tier separated by screening methods like magnetometers or canine units. The fact that Secret Service agents were able to stop the suspect from entering the ballroom means the system worked. 

“The magnetometers are a dangerous choke point, and that's why we make sure our magnetometers are far enough away from not only where the protectees are going to be, but where the events are going to be held,” he adds. 

Before every event, Secret Service agents also screen the venue for explosives, weapons, and listening devices, and ask the hotel and event staffers to go through a round of screening to prevent internal staff from harming any White House officials and their families. 

“They effectively have tactical control of that site, where the president will be, not the entire hotel,” de Geus says, which he describes as a “360 bubble” around the president.

Agents agree that given the historical challenges of protecting the president at the same hotel where Reagan was shot outside in 1981, it would be logistically safer for the president to attend events on the White House premise, but ultimately, the president, not the Secret Service agents, can make the final decisions on where he wants to attend an event, and there will always be a security risk as long as he is outside of the White House perimeter.