The Trump Administration has argued that the President’s new ballroom “advances critical national-security objectives,” by means of “missile-resistant steel columns, beams, drone-proof roofing materials, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass windows.” But how else?
Well, at ninety thousand square feet, the sheer scale of the ballroom will be a strategic national asset, designed to make everyone who enters it feel tiny and flaccid. Once everyone in the ballroom feels tiny and flaccid, there’s really no point in fighting.
Every surface will be gold-plated. Gold is critical for defense, as it reflects infrared radiation with near-perfect efficiency. But that’s boring. Mostly, it will tell the enemy that, although we may be tiny and flaccid, we’re very rich.
Guests will be formally announced upon entry by a majordomo with an extremely loud voice, making the ballroom impossible to infiltrate.
The formal obligation to bow or curtsy will force targets to bend a knee and break eye contact—a perfect opening for the President to place something distracting like a Twix bar on their heads.
In addition to the standard waltz, foxtrot, tango, Viennese waltz, quickstep, cha-cha, samba, rumba, paso doble, and jive, visitors to this ballroom will be expected to have mastered the Asmodeus, in which partners must face each other, maintaining complete and uninterrupted contact of the eyes, nose, lips, torso, elbows, legs, and heels.
For lasting defense, the White House ballroom will make the enemy feel like shit for at least ten years. It’s well known in the ballroom community that it takes about two years before you stop feeling like a complete disaster on the dance floor—and about ten before you feel genuinely competent.
When you see the President do a fallaway reverse and slip pivot, it will mean we’re at DEFCON 1. Or DEFCON 5, whichever one is worse.
Meanwhile, the sad, loitering wallflowers will actually be highly trained operatives of the Joint Special Operations Command, ready to execute lethal floorcraft at any moment, illuminated by a hundred rose-quartz chandeliers. Rose quartz is known to open the heart chakra and promote unconditional love. If that fails, individual, sharpened crystal prisms can be deployed on command.
The entire lighting system can be neutralized by flipping a single switch, obliterating all visibility except for a spotlight on the enemy’s crotch. (The President will be equipped with night-vision contact lenses, and therefore can continue dancing gracefully.)
While the standard ballroom line of dance travels counterclockwise around the floor, the White House ballroom may, at times, switch to clockwise, instantly creating a room full of line-of-dance criminals, which is a deportable offense.
While most ballroom dances are in 4/4 or 3/4 time, all of the Trump ballroom dances will be in 7/4. Think Pink Floyd’s “Money.”
Of course, this ballroom will have judges. Supreme Court Justices, actually. And, instead of scoring on the three pillars of footwork, timing, and connection, they will score on the five pillars of hostility, blowback, vulnerability, hair thickness, and hair thinness.
Ballroom staff will be equipped with cuff links that release sedative gas, bow ties that contain a garrote, white gloves with Tasers woven into the fingertips, champagne flutes that dribble, and fake vomit.
A defensive chocolate fountain, armed with fifty pounds of scalding ganache, can create a thermal barrier between a principal and an approach vector. At full operating temperature, the pump mechanism can be reversed, converting the fountain from a cascading display into a multidirectional Pompeii situation.
A magnetized floor system will be capable of immobilizing all guests except the President, whose footwear is equipped with countermeasures.
Under specific threat conditions, the dance floor can separate along pre-engineered seams, dumping guests into either a secure underground bunker or something yucky (T.B.D.).
Painful, unbroken-in ballroom shoes are considered to be a NATO Category 1 weapon. Targets routinely develop bunions, hammertoes, and plantar fasciitis.
On the other hand, ballroom dancing has been shown to reduce dementia risk—not that anyone has, or will ever have, dementia! ♦
