An image authentically shows an official rendering of U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned ballroom expansion dwarfing the White House.
In the months after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to build a large ballroom at the White House in July 2025, people shared their opinions about the plan on social media, many including images that appeared to be renderings of the project. One of those images was a rendering of an off-color building extending directly out from the main building of the White House and dwarfing it.
In October 2025, as work began on demolishing part of the White House’s East Wing to make room for the ballroom, a number of users shared that supposed rendering on Threads (archived), Instagram (archived) and X (archived).
The image, first posted immediately after Trump’s announcement, was viewed millions of times across social media sites, such as X (archived), Threads (archived), Reddit (archived) and Instagram (archived). Some posts (archived) claimed the rendering was official.
This image was not a genuine official rendering of the White House’s plans for a ballroom expansion; it was an AI-generated image.
The image did not appear on any of the renderings available on either of the two White House pages (archived, archived) dedicated to the ballroom expansion. It didn’t appear on the website for the project’s architects, McCrery Architects, nor could it be found on the websites for the project’s construction or engineering teams, Clark Construction and AECOM, neither of which had dedicated pages for the ballroom expansion as of Oct. 22, 2025.
The oldest version of the image Snopes could find was from an Aug. 1 post on Threads (archived). The person who posted the image, Frances Mercanti-Anthony, said in her post that she “asked ChatGPT to add a 90,000 square foot ballroom on to the 55,000 square foot White House.”
It’s unlikely an official rendering would have had some of the mistakes that could be found in the image posted by Mercanti-Anthony.
The ballroom is planned to be approximately 90,000 square feet and be “substantially separated” from the White House’s main building as an expansion to the East Wing, according to the White House.
The East Wing is on the right side of the White House when viewed from the direction of the National Mall, which is the side visible in the AI-generated image. However, the ballroom in that image appears on the main building’s left side, where the West Wing would be located, and not “substantially separated” from the main building.
The main building of the White House, excluding the wings, contains 55,000 square feet of floor space, according to the White House Historical Association. CBS News published what it said were new renderings of the proposed ballroom in September 2025. One of those renderings showed a ballroom that appeared larger than the rest of the White House, although with some distance between it and the White House’s main building.