Rumored rendering of Trump's planned White House ballroom isn't what it seems

Soon after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to build a large ballroom at the White House in late July 2025, people began sharing their opinions about the plan on social media. Some of these posts, such as one viewed more than 6 million times on X (archived), included an image that appeared to be a rendering of the proposed expansion dwarfing the main building of the White House.

The image was shared across social media sites, such as 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 Aug. 7, 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. Considering the proposed size of the ballroom, it would likely appear larger than the main building, although that did not appear to be the case in the official renderings.