Lindsey Graham on Monday tied the failed attack near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to the push for a White House ballroom, arguing the space matters when the president, vice president, speaker of the House and much of the Cabinet are in the room. He said he was pressing a bill to use $400 million in public funds to finish the project.
“So no, we’re gonna build this facility,” Graham said at the news conference, adding, “And I would suggest to the next president: ‘Don’t go to the Hilton!’” The dinner has been held at the Washington Hilton for the last 50 years, but Graham said the venue should not be treated as fixed if security and crowd size are part of the debate.
Asked why he was linking the two events so closely, Graham said the connection was obvious to him because “the room matters” when top officials are gathered in one place. He said, “The problem is you don’t have a choice. We’re gonna give people that choice,” and added that “the idea that you can’t do this in the ballroom will be up to the Correspondents’ Association.”
The backdrop is a fight over a project that would alter how the White House hosts major events, while the White House Correspondents’ Dinner remains a private event at a private location for a private organization. The proposed ballroom would hold fewer guests than the dinner did, even as the Department of Justice has moved to squash a lawsuit challenging the construction.
The shooting on Saturday has also rippled far beyond the ballroom debate. Right-wing commentators and conspiracy theorists have raised doubts about the legitimacy of the attempted assassination, while Molly Jong-Fast wrote on X, “When all you have is a ballroom everything looks like a nail,” and Nick Fuentes, described as a white nationalist and former Trump dinner guest, posted, “Does anybody else just not care about the White House Correspondent’s Dinner shooting like at all,”
Graham cast the project as a response to “the times in which we live,” saying there are people “driven to take up violence as an acceptable outcome in too many people’s opinion.” The immediate question now is not whether the ballroom fight will continue, but whether the attack will harden support for spending $400 million on a facility meant to change how the White House handles its biggest gatherings.