Trump uses the correspondents' dinner shooting to renew his White House ballroom push

Trump and his allies said the Correspondents' dinner shooting shows the necessity of his ballroom, even though it's far from certain that the annual dinner would be held there.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who was hustled out of a hotel ballroom Saturday night when a gunman dashed through a security checkpoint, is seizing on the incident to gin up support for a White House ballroom that has faced legal challenges that threaten to shut down the project.

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Trump has made the argument in the hours after the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that the nation needs a fortified ballroom on White House grounds so that the president and government officials are not in peril.

After laying out the security vulnerabilities of a busy hotel, Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom he is building where the East Wing once stood is “really what you need.”