The Ghost of John Adams Haunts Trump’s Ballroom
On October 11, 1798, President John Adams sat down to answer an address from the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Massachusetts militia. The letter he wrote that day has outlived nearly everything else he composed as President, not because of its occasion — a minor bit of correspondence amid fears of war with France — but because of its final sentence. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," Adams wrote. "It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."1
That sentence is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis, and it is the only lens through which the present controversy over President Trump's new White House ballroom makes any sense. The ballroom itself is not the subject of this article. Whether Donald Trump is a virtuous man, a religious man, or neither, is beside the point I intend to make, and I will not pretend otherwise. The point is this: a nation of virtuous, religious people would have looked at a proposal to build a large, useful, privately funded event space on the White House grounds and simply built it — debated its taste, perhaps, argued about its cost, but never needed to litigate whether the President possessed the "legal authority" to do something so plainly within the ordinary business of maintaining the People's House. That we cannot do this — that our first and often only question about any act of government is whether it is legal rather than whether it is right — is itself the proof of Adams's thesis. We have become a people who require law to do the work that character used to do, and the ballroom is simply the latest room in which that emptiness echoes.
What Adams Actually Meant
Adams's sentence is usually quoted alone, but it does not stand alone. In the two sentences before it, he explains exactly why a constitutional republic cannot function without a virtuous citizenry: "We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge, or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net."2 A net is not a wall. It has no independent strength; it holds only because something within it — the fish, the fabric of custom, the whale that has agreed for its own reasons to swim gently — cooperates with its structure. Adams's Constitution is a net thrown around a self-governing people. It works only because, and only to the extent that, the people inside it restrain themselves before the law ever has to.
He was not alone in this conviction. George Washington, in his Farewell Address two years earlier, had said much the same: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports... reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."3 Neither man believed the Constitution was a machine that would run itself. Both believed it was a wager — a bet that a free people, restrained internally by conscience and externally by almost nothing, would nonetheless behave with a rough decency that made elaborate legal micromanagement unnecessary.
Scripture had already said as much, in older and starker terms. "When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan."4 The quality of a people's rulers, and the health of the commonwealth generally, was never treated in the biblical tradition as a merely legal question. It was a moral one, flowing outward from the character of persons into the character of nations. "As the people's judge is, so are his officials; as the ruler of a city is, so are all its inhabitants."5 The Founders, steeped in this same tradition even where their private theologies wandered from orthodoxy, assumed that a free republic could only be as good as the virtue circulating within it. They built a government of laws, not of men, as Adams liked to say — but they never imagined that laws alone, absent men and women of character to obey and administer them, would be sufficient.6
The Ballroom as Exhibit A
Set this beside the ballroom. In the fall of 2025, the Trump administration began demolishing the White House's East Wing to make way for a ninety-thousand-square-foot ballroom, a project since estimated at some three to four hundred million dollars and described by the White House as privately funded.7 The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress in 1949, sued to stop it, arguing that no president has unilateral authority to demolish part of the White House or erect a new structure on public grounds without review by the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts, and Congress itself, and that the project violated the National Capital Planning Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Constitution's Property Clause.8 On August 31, 2026, a divided Supreme Court allowed construction to continue while the litigation proceeds, finding only that the Trust likely lacked standing to sue — expressly declining to rule on whether the ballroom project is actually lawful. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by the Court's three liberal justices, dissented, writing that the construction was "likely unlawful."9
I take no side here on the standing question, on the merits of the underlying statutes, or on whether Congress should have been consulted. Lawyers can and should argue that case; it is a perfectly legitimate one. What interests me is something upstream of the litigation: the sheer, undisguised ordinariness of what is being fought over. A president wants to add a large room to a house where state dinners and receptions have long outgrown the space available for them. Every president before him has renovated, expanded, or redecorated the White House in one fashion or another — Theodore Roosevelt rebuilt the West Wing, Truman gutted and rebuilt the entire interior, Nixon added a swimming pool, Obama and others added tennis and basketball courts.10 A ballroom, whatever one thinks of its scale or its architecture, is not a novel or sinister use of the property. It is the kind of thing a builder-president would obviously want, that most Americans would shrug at, and that in a healthier civic culture would occasion an argument about taste and cost, not a constitutional crisis over "unilateral authority."
That it has become the latter is the tell. We do not trust that the process by which this decision was made — one man's judgment, informed by whatever advisors he keeps, unconstrained by any independent moral compass we can verify — reflects anything we could call virtue, prudence, or a due sense of stewardship over a building that belongs, in some sense, to all of us and to those not yet born. So we reach, as we reach for everything now, for law. We ask not "was this a wise and honorable thing to do" but "did some statute permit it." We have made legality the whole of our public morality because we have nothing else left that both sides of an argument will recognize as a shared standard.
Why We Reach for Legality
This is worth dwelling on, because it explains far more than one construction dispute. A people who share a common moral horizon — who agree, broadly, on what temperance, honesty, humility, and stewardship look like, and who expect their leaders to embody those things because they expect it of themselves — do not need to reduce every decision of government to a statutory question. They can trust a president, a governor, a city council to exercise judgment, because judgment is understood to be disciplined by something internal: character, formed by habit, and habit, in the older understanding, formed substantially by religion. Remove that internal discipline, or simply stop assuming it exists, and every discretionary power becomes terrifying. If character cannot be trusted to restrain ambition, only handcuffs of law can — and so we forge more and more of them, hoping that where virtue has failed, statute might yet succeed.
This is precisely why we have accumulated an enormous body of what might be called national-preservation legislation: statutes creating independent commissions, mandatory review boards, environmental impact processes, historic-preservation trusts with standing to sue the government itself. None of this existed, or needed to exist, when the White House was rebuilt after the fire of 1814, when Theodore Roosevelt tore down and reconstructed the executive mansion's public rooms, or when Harry Truman gutted the entire interior down to the exterior walls and rebuilt it with steel framing.11 We did not yet feel the need to surround the presidency with a thicket of review boards because we still assumed, rightly or wrongly, that a president's own sense of what was fitting — his own virtue, however imperfect — would restrain him from recklessness. The proliferation of these statutes across the twentieth century is not an accident of bureaucratic growth. It is a monument to declining trust: legislative evidence that we no longer believe our elected leaders, of either party, possess enough character on their own to be safely left with discretion. We have had to legislate the restraint that virtue used to supply for free.
I want to be exceptionally clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that Donald Trump is a particularly virtuous or religious man, nor that his critics are wrong to be uneasy about the manner in which the East Wing came down. That is a separate question, and readers are free to reach their own conclusions about it. What I am arguing is structural: if the American people, and the man who happened to be sitting in the Oval Office, were both steeped in the kind of virtue Adams and Washington assumed as the baseline condition of republican government, the ballroom question would have answered itself long before it reached a courtroom. A genuinely virtuous president, confident that his own motives and his people's trust in him were sound, would have sought out Congress and the preservation commissions as a matter of honor, not compulsion — the way a virtuous man consults his family before selling the house they all live in, not because a law requires it, but because love and prudence do. And a genuinely virtuous citizenry, able to discern character in its leaders and to reward or punish it at the ballot box, would not need the National Capital Planning Commission to do the discerning for them. The statute exists precisely because we no longer trust that either half of that equation — leader or led — can be relied upon to supply the virtue that would make the statute unnecessary.
The Wider Wreckage
The disappearance of that shared moral and religious foundation is not confined to arguments about architecture. It is visible everywhere our politics has gone, and nowhere more starkly than in the resurgence of explicitly socialist and cultural-Marxist organizing within the American mainstream. The Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe organization for most of its four-decade existence, has more than doubled its membership in the past eighteen months, surpassing 120,000 dues-paying members by the summer of 2026 — larger than Eugene Debs's Socialist Party ever was at its Progressive-Era peak.12 DSA-aligned candidates, most visibly New York City's Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have moved from the margins of the Democratic Party toward its center of gravity, winning primaries and reshaping what a plausible national candidate is permitted to say about capitalism, private property, and the family.13 A 2025 national survey found thirty-nine percent of Americans viewing socialism favorably, with capitalism's own favorable rating falling to a bare majority.14
I do not raise this to indict one political tribe while excusing another; both major parties have their own varieties of the same disease. I raise it because the DSA's rise, like the ballroom litigation, is a symptom rather than a cause. A people that once possessed a shared religious anthropology — a common conviction, however imperfectly practiced, that the human person has inherent dignity, that private property is a legitimate extension of that dignity, that the family and the parish and the neighborhood mediate between the individual and the state — does not easily become fertile ground for an ideology that treats the state, or the collective, as the primary bearer of moral authority. Socialism's newest American converts are not, for the most part, converts from a robust religious faith; they are converts from an emptiness that religion and its attendant virtues used to fill. Where that emptiness exists, something will rush in to fill it, and increasingly it is an ideology that promises, in purely secular and often coercive terms, the solidarity and meaning that virtue and religion once supplied organically. The rise of the DSA and the fight over the ballroom are not unrelated stories. They are the same story, told in two different rooms: a people who have lost the internal, religiously grounded discipline the Founders assumed, reaching outward — some toward statute and litigation, others toward ideology and the state — to replace what character used to provide.
The Only Way Forward
None of this can be fixed by electing a more virtuous president, however much we might wish for one, because the mechanism by which a republic identifies and rewards virtue in its leaders is the virtue of the people who do the choosing. A people that has stopped forming its own conscience in religious practice, in the discipline of prayer and fasting and confession, in the slow cultivation of the cardinal and theological virtues within the family and the parish, will not reliably recognize virtue in a candidate even when it is offered, and will not reliably punish its absence even when it is glaring. Adams did not write to the Massachusetts militia that the Constitution required a virtuous government. He wrote that it required a virtuous people — the ordinary citizens of Lexington and Boston, not merely the officeholders in Philadelphia. The demand for virtuous leadership is a demand we are entitled to make only insofar as we have first submitted ourselves to the same standard.
That is the whole of the argument this essay has tried to make, and it is deliberately narrower than the news cycle surrounding it. The ballroom will be built, or it will not; the courts will eventually say what "unilateral authority" means for a twenty-first-century presidency; the DSA will grow or it will recede as all movements eventually do. What will not change, absent a genuine recovery of religion and the virtue it forms, is the underlying condition Adams diagnosed in 1798: a Constitution built for a moral and religious people, straining under the weight of a people who have decided they can do without either, and who are discovering, room by room and statute by statute, exactly how much of their common life depended on the thing they set aside.
EndNotes
Letter from John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts (Oct. 11, 1798), in 9 The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States 229 (Charles Francis Adams ed., 1854).
Id.
George Washington, Farewell Address (Sept. 19, 1796), reprinted in 35 The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, at 214, 224 (John C. Fitzpatrick ed., 1940).
Proverbs 29:2 (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition).
Sirach 10:2 (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition).
John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776), reprinted in 4 The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States 193 (Charles Francis Adams ed., 1851) (describing a republic as "an empire of laws, and not of men").
Michael Kunzelman & Lindsay Whitehurst, Preservation Group Urges Supreme Court to Suspend White House Ballroom Project, PBS NewsHour (Aug. 2026), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/preservation-group-urges-supreme-court-to-suspend-white-house-ballroom-project.
Trump Sued by Preservation Group over $300m White House Ballroom Project, The Guardian, https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-sued-preservation-group-over-202229568.html (last visited Sept. 1, 2026); see also National Capital Planning Act, 40 U.S.C. §§ 8701–8734 (2018); National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321–4370m-12 (2018); U.S. Const. art. IV, § 3, cl. 2.
Dan Mangan, Supreme Court Lets Trump White House Ballroom Construction Proceed, CNBC (Aug. 31, 2026), https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/supreme-court-white-house-ballroom.html.
White House Historical Association, Renovations and Additions, https://www.whitehousehistory.org (last visited Sept. 1, 2026). ↩
Id. (describing the Truman Reconstruction of 1948–1952, during which the White House interior was entirely rebuilt within its original exterior walls).
Mairead Elordi, DSA Boasts—on July 4—That It Has More Members Than Any Socialist Organization in US History, Daily Signal (July 6, 2026), https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/07/06/dsa-boasts-socialist-history/. ↩
Elaine Kamarck, Democratic Socialist Candidates Show Gains but Limited Reach in 2026, Brookings (Aug. 2026), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/democratic-socialist-candidates-show-gains-but-limited-reach-in-2026/.
David Manney, Socialism Keeps Returning Because America Keeps Forgetting, PJ Media (Aug. 6, 2026), https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2026/08/06/socialism-keeps-returning-because-america-keeps-forgetting-n4955876.
