President Trump gave reporters a tour of the new White House helicopter landing pad and discussed the new ballroom/undeground bunker under construction on the site of the East Wing:

DONALD TRUMP: It’s the kind of thing that should have been done. It’s also four inches thick. Normally you’d get an inch or an inch and a half. It’s four inches thick and makes it much more powerful because it’s the White House. And this comes through contributions, donations from numerous people, including me. And now we’re going to walk over and we’re going to see. This goes equidistant on the other side. And right over there, if you notice, is where the ballroom and military complex will be. And the military complex is going to have a drone-proof roof, and you’re going to have, on top of the roof, you’re going to have drones, many drones, which will protect Washington, D.C., and will protect the White House. Very important. So let’s take a look at the helipad, and we’ll walk together if you’d like. And in fact, instead of being on grass, now they’ll be using that almost like a table. They can have events on it. They can have people go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom after that’s finished. We can have really incredible-this is unbelievable for state, without even having to go into the White House. They get out of the car on the beautiful new roadway. They get out of the car and they walk down this path onto that, and they can have cocktails and everything outside of the White House, and then they go into the ballroom. Even the military, they can use it like that. And we have-the ballroom is so much a military component, with the drones and the bomb shelters and everything else that we have in there. So it’s really, you know, that started off as a ballroom, and before we started work, the military came to see me and they say, “Sir, we have an opportunity to do something incredible here, and we’ve been trying to do it for 100 years, but we’ve never had an opportunity like that.” So I had to make that decision, and I said, “Look, go ahead. Design what you want.” And that goes down five stories. You know, it goes down almost 65 feet. Well, I’m not allowed to discuss that, but a lot of very detailed stuff. That’s why bringing the lawsuit was very unfortunate, because most people didn’t know that. Now they do know that. They shouldn’t have known that. And I told that to the National-it’s called the National Trust for Historic Preservation of the United States. It’s not associated with the United States. The United States doesn’t even donate to it because they don’t agree with it, because they’ve made fools out of themselves over the years. But I said to them, you know, “If you do this, you’ll file it in court and people will see what we’re doing, and the enemy shouldn’t be allowed to see it.” They didn’t care about that because they don’t care about the country.

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