It's Not a Ballroom. It's a Bunker.

The Trump administration has torn down the East Wing to build a new ballroom. Despite all the noise, everyone seems to be overlooking a simple fact.

As a piece in The Hill mentions in passing, the east wing hides a bunker. Roosevelt built the bunker during WWII, after Pearl Harbor, and he used the east wing specifically to cover it up. The bunker has served as an emergency operations center ever since. They don't care what sits on top of it. That's an afterthought.

Traditionally, the First Lady uses it.

Tiny corners of the internet are whispering that the demolition has nothing to do with a ballroom. It has everything to do with upgrading the bunker. Since they're hardening the bunker, they might as well build Trump the ballroom of his dreams, the perfect place to run crypto schemes and host corrupt dictators.

Trump's niece Mary, a vocal critic, has confirmed that the regime is simply using the ballroom as a cover for new bunker plans. Sources have also informed CBS News that the bunker upgrades will definitely happen during the ballroom's construction. You can read about all of that here.

So, there you go.

If you don't believe in conspiracies: When Roosevelt's administration was building the first bunker, they also lied to the public about it. They said they were renovating the east wing to put in a museum. They knew they were fibbing.

The president technically has more than one bunker. There's the first one built by Roosevelt's administration, and a second one under the north lawn, and potentially a whole network of subterranean tunnels and command centers throughout D.C., stretching all the way into the Virginia mountains. They run hundreds of feet deep. The second one, under the White House Lawn, contains its own air supply.

It also has a food and water cache.

The media frequently primes the public to salivate over plush bunkers while dismissing the motivations for them as "paranoia." Meanwhile, actuaries have warned world leaders that current estimates of the climate crisis are deeply misleading. In reality, 3C of global warming will drop the global GDP by 50 percent and kill billions. As a report by The Guardian summarizes: "At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events." That's right, 3C of warming equals 4 billion deaths. Climate research increasingly points at 3-4C of warming as the new likely scenario. In practical terms, we've already crossed the 1.5C threshold, a decade earlier than expected.

We'll likely breach 2C by the end of the decade, and by then things will look bad enough that life will look and feel like collapse. It won't be theoretical or hypothetical anymore. It's going to be a lived experience for many of us.

That's why they're building bunkers.

It's not exactly surprising that someone like Trump would want an upgraded bunker where he plans to spend more time hanging out as the world falls apart. Everyone from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg are doing it. Zuckerberg has reportedly spent $300 million on his bunker, which just happens to match the amount Trump has raised to pay for his bunker, ahem, I mean, his ballroom.

They're not just making the Spartan bomb shelters of yore.

They're installing premium sanctuaries. Their demands have spawned an entire industry that builds luxury bunkers. These bunker companies are building their clients everything from underground sports car garages and swimming pools to movie theaters and virtual golf courses. They're building fabrication workshops. They're building arsenals. They're building drone hatches. As one bunker builder puts it, “The scale and complexity of these environments have expanded dramatically, evolving far beyond survivalist shelters into fully integrated, high-comfort retreats.”

Will Trump's bunker have a virtual golf course?

I wouldn't doubt it.

The press casts doubt on the Trump regime's timeline, saying there's almost no chance they'll actually finish before he leaves office. Of course, they're basing that on what's "normal." Nothing normal is happening under this administration. As we've seen, when the super rich put their minds to it, they can accomplish almost anything with a swiftness that leaves everyone's jaws on the floor.

For example:

Elon Musk's AI company partnered with Nvidia to build the Colossus supercomputer near Memphis. It took them about four months, after estimates said it would take years. Experts consider it a superhuman feat. Now look at the speed they're attacking the "ballroom" with. They've already completely torn down the old east wing. They're not wasting any time on this thing, are they?

Consider who's paying for it.

From The Guardian:

Donors for the proposed ballroom include a slew of major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google. Defense contractors and communications companies have also pitched in, including Lockheed Martin, Palantir, T-Mobile and Comcast.

These corporations have accumulated $350 million for construction. The biggest tech companies in the world are paying hundreds of millions for... a ballroom? Defense contractors are chipping in?

No, I don't think so...

Companies like Palantir don't dabble in ballrooms. They're in the business of building mass surveillance software, artificial intelligence suites, and drones. In fact, the U.S. military recently signed a $10 billion contract with Palantir for new toys. They've signed contracts with several big tech companies, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Even Amazon is quietly starting partnerships with the defense industry.

As we recently noted here, Silicon Valley has taken a hard military turn over the last year. The Trump administration has even created a "technical innovation unit" that's recruiting CEOs and project managers from the same major tech companies that are funding the east wing construction. Tech investment in military tech has spiked 33 percent. They're clearly preparing for all kinds of wars, especially urban ones.

Of course, Mary Trump makes the big mistake of dismissing the bunker as yet another sign of a fragile ego, and not a dark omen.

It's a dark omen.

You don't spend hundreds of millions on a structure with a bunker underneath it simply because you're a paranoid loon with a big ego. Big military tech companies certainly don't foot the bill for it. Don't get me wrong, Trump is definitely a paranoid loon with a big ego. So is Peter Thiel and Russell Vought. But these aren't the paranoid loons of ten years ago. They're the paranoid loons of the 2020s, the ones who understand the depths of the climate crisis, the ones who lived through a pandemic, the ones watching the collapse take shape and all of the civil unrest it's inspiring.

These bunkers have become their own perverse status symbols, with super rich families trying to top each other in terms of luxury and spectacle. Some families have built bunkers with moats, with underground race tracks for their kids, inside bamboo forests, and I suspect one or two have theme parks and shopping malls. The Kardashians tried to build a bunker with an underground spa.

Trump's bunker tells us something.

They know.

As we've discussed here, the super rich and their political puppets are fully aware of what's going on with the climate crisis. Big tech companies have largely dropped their climate pledges. So have the big banks and investment firms. They're all going full steam ahead with coal and gas, and they're rebooting nuclear plants, too. They're doing it to power their AI fantasies, because they desperately want to replace people with robots while starving us and unleashing a pandora's box of diseases. They know what's in the latest climate reports. They know "there's no future." They sell hope to the masses, while quietly preparing for the end of the world. The mainstream media, and the Mary Trumps of the world, write them off as paranoid.

It's so much worse than that.

The billionaires have gone bunkers. As we document here every week, every action indicates that they're not just preparing for collapse, they're betting on it, they're driving it. They want it to happen. We're already crossing tipping points, like the loss of the coral reefs. Things we predicted for the 2040s are happening now.

What else?

Consider what's going on in South America, with the Trump regime now essentially engaging in low-level warfare with Venezuela. They've sent the USS Gerald Ford to the region, the world's largest warship, which carries 90 aircraft. They're also drawing up plans for ground operations in the country. They claim it's about drugs. Of course, it's not. Venezual isn't run by cartels.

Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves.

Yes, they have more oil than Saudi Arabia.

Get it?

Venezuela sits a lot closer to the U.S. than Saudi Arabia. Trump has recently renewed Chevron's license to operate in the country, pumping oil without paying any royalties or taxes to the Venezuelan government. That doesn't sit well with Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro. Of course, not. Why would it?

Even though much of Venezuela's oil is extra-heavy crude, the world is getting desperate enough to want that, too. All of it.

Trump wants to get rid of Maduro so his regime can broker access to the country's massive oil reserves. He's doing it for the same reason the world's major corporations have abandoned their climate pledges. He's doing it for the same reasons tech companies are now pouring everything into AI and military tech. He's doing it for the same reasons MAGA Republicans are dismantling the government and cutting off aid to half the world. He's doing it for the same reason he's building a new bunker.

Trump serves as the figurehead of a deeply paranoid technocratic network who sees the world collapsing, because they collapsed it. They plan to wage wars from their cyberbunkers, at home and abroad.

You may have also seen stories that Trump is contemplating a third term. Yes, we already know it's unconstitutional. But this Trump, often called "Trump 2.0," has even less regard for the constitution than he did in 2020.

Everything they've done so far indicates that they're planning to seize control of elections by 2026, and certainly by 2028. By then, it won't matter what's constitutional. The Thiels and Voughts will run Trump as long as they can, until he literally keels over dead, either in office or at one of his rallies, and then they'll replace him with Vance. By then, they'll have a firm grip on blue cities and polling places. If Trump never gets to enjoy his ballroom bunker, I'm sure Vance will use it.

So, if you were planning to take over the government, invade major cities, preside over a deep recession, nurture new pandemics, start wars with other countries for their resources, and potentially invade Canada, all while the planet's climate breaks down into a chaotic mix of droughts, dust storms, heat waves, and hurricanes that ultimately collapse the GDP by 50 percent and kill billions of people....

Wouldn't you want a cool new bunker?

I would.

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