MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him continue building a new ballroom for the White House. An appeals court ruled that Trump needs approval from Congress to move forward, so Trump filed the emergency request on Friday. Trump has increasingly justified the construction by citing national security, instead of his first explanation was that he needed more space and a more luxurious reception for guests.
The legal process has revealed details about a bunker that Trump indicates is being built by the military under the site for the ballroom. We wanted to know more about what that bunker is all about, so we've called Garrett Graff, who has studied doomsday scenarios. He is a presidential historian and author of "Raven Rock: The Story Of The U.S. Government's Secret Plan To Save Itself-While The Rest Of Us Die." Good morning, Mr. Graff. Thanks for joining us.
GARRETT GRAFF: Good morning.
MARTIN: So the president says building the bunker is an urgent need, hence the emergency request. So let me back up for a minute. How long has there been some kind of emergency hideout for the president, and how does that fit into plans for continuity of government in the event of a catastrophic event?
GRAFF: The White House bunker dates back to World War II and right after Pearl Harbor, when we were afraid of a Japanese air raid or German air raid on Washington, D.C. It's gone through several major iterations, but was sort of rebuilt by Harry Truman in the Cold War in his presidency and then has been updated regularly ever since. And the last major update that we know about happened during the Obama administration after 9/11.
MARTIN: Interesting. So fairly new. So do we know anything about how this new bunker would look or what would it do that's different from what's already there?
GRAFF: Yeah. So the challenge, of course, with anything that Donald Trump says is it's hard to know what's real, what's not and what's hyperbole. And - but the scale of the facility that he has talked about on social media and his public statements would be a dramatic change in the way that presidential continuity operations have thought about the president's security, where the White House bunker facility has always been meant to be a short term facility, something where the president would stay for minutes or hours as a more secure evacuation plan was put into place.
The scale that Donald Trump is talking about would place it alongside some of the major government relocation facilities where presumably someone could stay for days, weeks or even longer.
MARTIN: Is there any evidence to support that this is urgent?
GRAFF: No. And that's really the heart of the legal case at this point, which is the judge in this case has basically said, your only argument that it is urgent to build this is that you tore down the east wing, that you exposed this vulnerability to the bunker underneath - the existing bunker underneath the east wing, and now it's urgent to fix that, but this is a problem that you created yourself, Mr. President.
MARTIN: So, you know, your book "Raven Rock" is named after another bunker. Would you tell us about that? I mean, how does that fit into presidential emergency plans?
GRAFF: Sure. So the long-term or long-running plans for presidential evacuations has always been that your goal should be to get the president out of the White House as quickly as possible because that's the place everyone knows and expects the president to be. You know, you want to get him to a place where people don't expect him to be. And so for decades, that has been one of three places.
One, up into the sky, either aboard Air Force One or another 747 that's known as the E-4B, the presidential doomsday plane, or to one of the two mountain-sized bunkers that the U.S. government runs outside of Washington. There's a FEMA facility in Berryville, Virginia, known as Mount Weather, and then Raven Rock, which is the backup Pentagon in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Each of those could support a thousand people for a month.
MARTIN: Wow. Interesting. So before we let you go, do you think the national security argument is going to be more appealing to the courts than his arguments for a more luxurious ballroom?
GRAFF: Historically, presidents get a lot more leeway around national security, and I think that's why you're really seeing him lean into this because if this is a battle about historic preservation or congressional appropriation, then he's going to lose.
MARTIN: That is author and presidential historian Garrett Graff. Mr. Graff, thank you.
GRAFF: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
