On Monday’s episode, co-host Whoopi Goldberg—who still can’t bring herself to say Donald Trump’s name out loud, opting instead for “you-know-who”—floated what she clearly thought was a bright idea: the president should build a brand-new hotel in Washington, D.C., complete with a cavernous ballroom big enough to host the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
“Here is something, you-know-who always talks about he is a builder, he knows how to do this,” Goldberg said. “Maybe he needs to build a new hotel there that has a big enough ballroom, where they don’t have to go to the Hilton, where the ballroom is under the building. This is what he says he does well.”
That suggestion came in the wake of a frightening shooting incident at Saturday night’s WHCA Dinner, held at a Hilton hotel in D.C., where gunfire sent attendees scrambling and forced the evacuation of Trump and top officials. Thankfully, the Secret Service did its job, and what could have been catastrophic wasn’t.
Goldberg even acknowledged the layered security likely prevented a worse outcome: “Thank God that, you know, this thing was in the basement where they couldn’t — you couldn’t get to him so you had to go here and here and here before you can even get to here.”
“Forget destroying the White House,” Goldberg added, taking a swipe at Trump’s proposal to revamp the East Wing to include a new, larger ballroom for official events.
And there’s the irony, big enough to fill—well—a ballroom.
Because while Goldberg is urging Trump to build a massive, secure event space somewhere in D.C., she’s simultaneously dismissing the idea of building… a massive, secure event space at the White House itself. You know, the place already guarded like Fort Knox.
Instead, she doubled down: “I’m saying maybe it’s time someone built a hotel with a bigger ballroom, because the ballroom, you’re never going to have enough seats for everybody. You’re just not.”
So let’s get this straight: a purpose-built ballroom at the White House? Bad. A hypothetical hotel ballroom blocks away? Brilliant.
Got it.
Meanwhile, others in Washington aren’t treating this like a daytime talk show brainstorming session. Republican lawmakers have seized on the incident as proof that high-profile events need to be held in more secure, controlled environments—like, say, a dedicated White House ballroom.
Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana is already moving to fast-track legislation to approve construction, arguing that “a president of any party should be able to host events in a secure area without attendees worrying about their safety.”
“It is an embarrassment to the strongest nation on Earth that we cannot host gatherings in our nation’s capital… without the threat of violence and attempted assassinations.”
Even co-host Sunny Hostin struck a rare note of clarity, saying Americans should be “outraged” that a shooter allegedly targeted the president and his team.
But back at The View, the conversation somehow landed on hospitality development instead of hard security solutions.
In the end, Goldberg’s pitch boils down to this: Trump should do what he says he does best—build big. Just not in the one place where it might actually make the most sense.
You can’t make it up.
