The edifice suggests a Silicon Valley-style desire to protect the president from national crises of his own making

A self-declared “secretary of war” keeps committing war crimes; people are dying in Africa because of Musk’s cuts to USAid; farm bankruptcies in the US are surging ; ICE keeps acting with impunity; measles is spreading … and we are worried about a ballroom? The ballroom is not just the president’s peculiar obsession, but a symbol for many of the character of Trump 2.0: the unprecedented corruption; the destruction of checks and balances (as Congress, with its power of the purse, keeps being ignored); the sheer desire for vandalism. The swift pivot of Trump and his acolytes from the assassination attempt to pro-ballroom propaganda in the name of security adds two new, disturbing elements: the ballroom-as-bunker is appropriate for a leader afraid of his own people; less obviously, it also aligns Trump with the Silicon Valley figures who are anticipating an apocalypse (which their own conduct is hastening) – and who seek refuge on private islands, in newly founded cities, and indeed in what has become known as “ apocalypse bunkers ”.

“It cannot be built fast enough,” Trump announced after the incident on Saturday night; but reasons for his ballroom obsession predate the White House correspondents’ dinner: his biographers have pointed out that catering and ballrooms have been one of his few successful business ventures; a ballroom, just as with the space at Mar-a-Lago, provides a stage for grand entrances and adulation by crowds whose composition can be perfectly controlled; and, not least, as other aspiring autocrats have shown, a huge edifice is a statement about power: it sends a signal to critics that the leader has triumphed over them, and that his legacy – at least what he has done to the built environment – cannot be undone.

Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University