'Envision chandeliers': Trump touts ballroom after midterms rout

WASHINGTON: While Republicans nursed a brutal hangover from their US midterm defeat, President Donald Trump was busy showing off his new ballroom at the White House.

"It's going to be not only one of the biggest, but it'll be the most beautiful ballroom I think anywhere in the world," Trump told reporters inside the building's skeleton.

It was a surreal start to one of Trump's most surreal press conferences.

Instead of the formal post-midterm remarks that previous presidents have made, the 80-year-old announced that he was there to sign the final steel beam going into the roof of his US$400 million pride and joy.

He followed up with an extraordinary 16-minute speech on everything from marble to kitchen layouts to drones.

"Now envision chandeliers all over the ceiling," the former real estate magnate said, speaking against a backdrop of a huge American flag. "Envision marble floors."

Absent from the billionaire president's monologue was any mention of the stinging rebuke from US voters angered by the Iran war and the cost of living.

'Creme de la creme'

And while reporters waited to question him on how he would govern when Democrats take control of Congress, Trump kept talking about how the ballroom's classical columns would dwarf those of the US Supreme Court.

"They're being carved out of beautiful limestone, and they'll be Corinthian – the Corinthian design which is considered the creme de la creme," Trump said.

Then he was on to the marble floors.

"It's a vein that people have been after for 50 years, and the owner of the quarry didn't want to sell it, but he liked me," he said.

He was not finished. Trump also wanted to talk about the building's roof, which he said could hold up to 100 drones or a number of helicopters, and how Chinese President Xi had admired the structure when he visited the White House in September.

Was this all a sign of what Trump actually intended to spend his time doing in his remaining two years in office?

It certainly looked like it — not least because it echoed Trump's election-eve press conference on Monday to reopen the refurbished Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which critics derided as tone-deaf.

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'Day of celebration'

Afterwards, it was US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's turn to speak.

"Today, of course, is a day of celebration, and it's a day of gratitude," Burgum said — a day after Democrats seized both the House of Representatives and Senate from Republicans.

Reality intruded when Trump finally took questions from reporters at the construction site, but anyone expecting a Trump-style tantrum was to be disappointed.

The president was remarkably sanguine about the election results and was not even moved by Vice President JD Vance's earlier statement that the Iran war was the "reason we lost", an apparent break with the president by a likely candidate for the 2028 election.

"I think it's largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term," Trump said.

The president then fielded a few questions on whether he would work with Democrats and warned them against trying to impeach him for a third time.

"Our country is more successful right now than at any time in its history," he said, before breaking off mid-sentence and pointing to the ceiling.