White House Bunker Mystery Solved?

Trump says new ballroom will include “massive” underground bunker to protect from drone attacks

In the riveting missile-terror thriller “A House of Dynamite,” a select group of White House officials, some of them petrified, are ordered to the bunker—officially the Presidential Emergency Operations Center—beneath the East Wing. Its status has been a mystery ever since President Trump ordered the East Wing torn down to build a ballroom.

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Trump’s plans for a $400 million ballroom where the White House East Wing once stood appears close to being resolved: The envisioned new structure will include a “massive” new underground military bunker to protect officials from drone attacks, replacing the underground bomb shelter that had been sitting there largely unnoticed for more than 80 years.

The fate of the existing shelter, originally constructed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has been a backdrop to the controversy that has raged for months over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.

But new details about the president’s plans—revealed Sunday night by Trump himself—point to a remodeled and enlarged underground facility designed in part for the new era of drone warfare.