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From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. It's been called opulent by Fox News, dictator chic and politico, while the Washington Post went with Imperial, when describing the president's aesthetic, with its gold accents in the Oval Office and massive portraits on federal buildings.

And now it's influencing plans for a 90,000 square foot ballroom that's expected to dwarf the some 55,000 square foot White House.

This hour, we get the latest developments on the ballroom and the president's other construction plans

and what they add up to in terms of the messages they send and their effect on the American people.

Listeners, how do you interpret the president's drive to build big and shiny?

Tell us by calling 866-733-6786 by posting on our social channels at KQED forum or by emailing forum at kQED.org.

Joining me is Naftali Ben-David, senior political correspondent at the Washington Post,

whose piece last month is called the imperial aesthetic at the heart of Donald Trump's presidency.

Naftali, welcome to forum. Thanks for having me. So first, what's the status of Trump's

Ballroom Project? I think in July it was described as costing $200 million with a

650 person capacity, but both have gone up now, I understand. They have gone up. I mean,

the current estimated cost is $300 million with a 1,000 person capacity, approximately 90,000

square feet, which is just about as big, maybe not quite as big as the whole rest of the White House, but it's proceeding apace. The president recently parted ways with his former architect, seemingly because that architect was not necessarily capable of handling so massive a project on so quick a timeline because the president does want to get this done

by the end of his term.

The president is also set to submit the project to the DC Planning Commission, but it has

to be said that that's way later in the process than that usually happens.

And in some sense, it's already a done deal.

And so you could look at submitting it to the DC.C. Planning Commission as a formality at this

point. But the long and short of it is it's full speed ahead. Wow. And also the D.C. Planning

...