Mary Margaret O'Loha[n]

Good morning, Ben.

Thanks for having me.

Yes.

So I don't know if you can see behind me over my shoulder, there is smoke, kind of a cloudy look coming from the demolition of the East Wing, which the president is removing, changing to make room for the ballroom that he and his donors are funding.

So this is a huge, costly endeavor, but the American taxpayer is not paying for it.

The president is and donors that he calls great American patriots.

There has been a lot of hubbub about this around here, a lot of backlash.

As I was coming in this morning, a lot of the photographers and videographers were getting footage of the smoke back there.

I myself took videos of it because it's interesting.

This is newsy, but what we're hearing from everyone is that how could the president do this?

How could the president remove the East Wing?

And, you know, there's a lot of history, Ben, of different presidents making renovations to the White House.

from Teddy Roosevelt to Harry Truman.

All of these presidents have made changes to the White House, but this one in particular seems to have raised the ire of a lot of the reporters around here, a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who do not want the president to do this.

Now, Trump himself is saying that this is a gift to the American people.

He's saying this is something that will be long-lasting and that

many generations of Americans and American presidents and their families and their guests can enjoy.

And it does look beautiful.

I was in the Oval Office last night.

He had a mock presentation of this new renovation out on the table that all the reporters could look at.

And he had all the plans with him.

So he kind of whipped them out and showed them to us and said, well, I've been talking about this the whole time.

I wanted to show this to anybody who will listen.

And he showed us these pictures of what he wants the new ballroom to look like.

You know, Alex Pfeiffer, one of the president's former staffers, I saw him tweeting about this last night, how the president has always been putting these pictures out there.

It's very clear that the East Wing wasn't there in the photos.

In fact, the ballroom was.

So a lot of the hubbub around here seems more noise than actual

concerns for reality.

And I think, as Josh Hawley said last night, the senator from Missouri, there's a lot of people who are upset about this that had no problem with pulling down monuments to history over the past several years.

So another ruckus news cycle at the White House.

There's a press briefing later today, and I'm sure we will hear about it there.

But in the meantime, it's an interesting news cycle to follow.

And I think we'll soon have a beautiful ballroom here on the White House grounds.

No, no, they're not.

In fact, you know, I'm standing right now on Pebble Beach, which is right outside the White House.

The West Wing is where a lot of the offices of the comms team are.

The main section of the White House is where a lot of these other important offices are, including the Oval Office, which is kind of, you know, we go back to, it's a little hard to explain, but you go through the White House and it's on the back, on the right.

So it's not on the East Wing side of things.

And a lot of the ruckus that's been raised about this has been suggesting that there's some kind of historical significance that's being destroyed with this.

But again, there's been renovations throughout the history of the White House for years.

There have been many presidents who have made changes or modifications.

you know, updating the White House for modern appliances, modern security endeavors.

I mean, one thing that I found really interesting about the ballroom is that the president said it's going to have, I believe, a steel-proof ceiling.

So a lot of different security measures that are being put in that he said the Army and the military is involved with.

So it's really interesting on many levels.

One thing that I find really interesting is that the man who is designing the ballroom is actually someone that I know, that I've spent some time with, James McCreery, who's an architect.

He's a Catholic architect.

He's built some really beautiful churches around the country.

So I think that's, if anything, very encouraging to know that we have a traditional classical architecturist who is taking this plan into his hands and making a beautiful historic ballroom.

And I, for one, hope that if there is a White House Christmas party for the media this year, it would be really cool if it was in there, and I would love to see it.

Yeah, this is interesting because on the one hand, these No Kings protests were largely full of, I would say, elderly Americans who are very left-leaning Democrats protesting things that they did not really understand.

So, for example, our colleagues Amber Jo and Brecca did a phenomenal job this weekend covering the No Kings protests in D.C.,

And they asked people, why are you protesting no kings if President Trump is not a king?

It was a really great video, and if anyone hasn't seen it, you should check it out.

But at the same time, there was a very radical element of these protests.

And if you look at some of the footage in Denver, in Chicago,

In Los Angeles, even in Washington, D.C., there were individuals that came to these protests specifically to advocate for violence.

One person that I noticed, besides President Trump, that was receiving a lot of these very violent, explicit calls to violence was Stephen Miller.

So he is Trump's deputy chief of staff.

He received a lot of hate, I would say, in D.C., I saw.

but then also in different cities around the country, people explicitly calling for acts of violence against him.

We just covered a story for this that's live on the Daily Wire site about how I talked to the FBI about whether they're investigating any of these specific

calls for violence explicit, I would say calls for violence.

And, you know, I was told the FBI can't confirm active investigations.

They don't traditionally do that.

But I was told they are aware of very specific instances and that they are keeping an eye on them.

So, you know, I think this is the closest we can get to confirming without actually confirming that there's investigations into these people.

One that I found really disturbing and I just wanted to flag was this couple that were photographed in Denver.

They're part of the Denver communist group.

And this couple, each of them were wearing a different shirt calling for violence against individuals, specifically Republicans, conservatives, and they kind of hearkened back to the death of Charlie Kirk.

One of the shirts said, make assassinations great again.

And the other one said that not enough politicians are being killed nowadays.

And that one I found particularly disturbing.

because on the graphic of the shirt, there's a little sign that says live indicating that the person who was being killed on the shirt was being filmed as it happened live.

So this is really sickening, disturbing kinds of content.

And I think that, you know, our story is evidence that the FBI is looking into this.

DHS may also be looking into this and we're trying to get more answers from them on who exactly they're examining and when those people will be arrested or, you know, at least investigated at the bare minimum.

Thanks, Ben.