The foundation of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom appears to be taking shape.
On Monday, casings for drilling shafts were spotted being transported to where the East Wing had stood for 123 years—until last month. Washington, D.C.-area photographer Andrew Leyden captured the cylinders downtown on a flatbed, which then pulled up to the South Lawn. One of the casings was later seen in a vertical position.
After the East Wing was controversially torn down to make space for a ballroom that Trump, 79, will reportedly name after himself, construction companies involved in the project have tried to make themselves harder to contact. The logo on the truck in Leyden’s photographs wasn’t immediately identifiable.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
The 90,000-square-foot venue—which White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted last month was the president’s “main priority”—has a current price tag of about $300 million. In July, though, the estimate was a full $100 million less, so whether the current figure will remain unchanged is anyone’s guess.
Donors to the space, which has an estimated completion date of Jan. 2029, include tech giants, defense contractors, cryptocurrency investors and media conglomerates, CNN has reported.
Trump has also suggested he would use money from any legal battles he wins to fund his pet project. He is reportedly calling on his own Justice Department to pay him $230 million in compensation for the investigations against him while he was out of office.
“They probably owe me a lot of money, but if I get money from our country, I’ll probably do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House while we restore the White House,” he said.
The East Wing demolition occurred even after Trump insisted in July that the project wouldn’t “interfere with the current building.”
“It won’t be. It’ll be near it, but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he said during an executive order signing. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place.”
First Lady Melania Trump’s staff has temporarily been working elsewhere in the White House complex.
“She loved her little tiny office,” Trump told Fox News in an interview Monday, but added that his wife has since come around.
“If you would ask her now, she says it’s great,” he claimed, later describing the East Wing as a “poor, sad site.”
