In a display of recklessness and decay, Soros-backed Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner told a crowd at the President’s House site Tuesday he wants a piece of Trump’s White House ballroom “after we all blow it up.” He said that in 10 to 15 years he would keep it as a paperweight on his desk, that the demolition would happen “in an official ceremony,” and that pieces would be sold “to give the taxpayers their money back.”
The comments, first captured on video by NBC10 Philadelphia, were delivered at the 24th annual Slavery Commiseration at the President’s House in Old City, a National Park site already in a fight over how the history of enslaved people at George Washington’s residence is presented.
Construction is underway on the former East Wing site. The Supreme Court issued a stay allowing the work to continue.
Krasner skipped that record. He framed the ballroom as destined for erasure.
“There will not be a ballroom. There will not be a Kennedy Center renamed for a fool,” he said. He called Trump a “pain in the ass” and “the embodiment of hate, the embodiment of ignorance, and the embodiment of depriving people of their vote and education.”
Krasner’s remarks were not analysis. They were projections.
He assigned to Trump the charges that have followed his own career as DA: inflammatory rhetoric, untrustworthy presentations to courts, and a habit of treating institutional constraints as illegitimate.
Krasner’s office exists to prosecute crime in Philadelphia. On Tuesday he stood at a federal park site and talked about destroying part of the People’s House in Washington.
Attorney General Todd Blanche called him out Wednesday on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom. “The ballroom is being built,” Blanche said. “And it’s disgusting that a district attorney in Philadelphia, who, by the way, has a city with its own problems, is so focused on what the president is doing in the White House.”
Blanche also called the project a national-security issue and said the Supreme Court’s stay allows construction to proceed. Asked later about the tape, Krasner said he stood by the remarks “100 percent,” because “when you demolish a building, you do it with explosives and/or wrecking balls.”
The sloppiest line on the tape is the rebate. Krasner told the crowd the wreckage would be sold “to give the taxpayers their money back.”
The White House has said the ballroom itself is financed with about $400 million in private donations. Krasner turned that into a line about “giving the taxpayers their money back.”
That statement sits next to his own property file. Tiger Building LP, a limited partnership in which Krasner held a reported 40% and whose officer entity listed him as president, had a $130,000 school-district Use & Occupancy judgment entered against it in 2016 and later entered a reduced payment plan.
Krasner, the man selling demolition of the White House as a taxpayer refund spent years explaining why an entity he co-owned was late with the school district.
This is not Krasner’s first turn on the national megaphone. First elected in 2017, he has long been the poster child of the progressive-prosecutor movement.
A Soros-funded independent expenditure committee, Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety, spent nearly $1.7 million supporting his first campaign, more than five times what Krasner’s own committee spent in that primary.
His campaigns and Real Justice PAC, tied to BLM activist Shaun King, later settled twice with Philadelphia’s Board of Ethics over contribution limits, embedded staff paid by the PAC and disclosure failures: $4,000 in penalties plus $11,020 in disgorgement for the 2017 cycle, then $10,000 for the campaign and $30,000 for the PAC in 2021.
Real Justice also rented office space from Tiger Building LP, the limited partnership in which Krasner held a reported 40% stake. Emails reported by Broad & Liberty, drawn from records obtained by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, show the Wren Collective overlapping work for Krasner’s campaign, Real Justice PAC, and the district attorney’s office at the same time.
“Wren didn’t serve two masters; it served three,” said LELDF policy director Sean Kennedy. City ethics director Shane Creamer said Wren appeared to be a vendor for the Krasner committee and pointed to the 2019 and 2021 settlements.
Weeks after a jury convicted 52nd Ward leader Stephen Jones of aggravated indecent assault of a child under 13, Krasner appeared at a ward breakfast Jones hosted.
Opponent Pat Dugan called it an endorsement. Krasner said he did not know and called using the victim as a “political football” disgusting. Jones said he invited both candidates and endorsed no one. Jones later got a short jail term and long house arrest, far below what prosecutors sought.
This is the same Krasner the House impeached 107–85 in 2022 on seven articles that included dereliction of duty amid the homicide surge, mishandled cases, violations of victims’ rights, and obstruction of a House inquiry.
In coverage of the fight, the Inquirer reported office data showing dismissals and withdrawals rising from about 30% of offenses in 2016 to 67% in 2021.
Gun-possession conviction rates fell as Krasner’s early moves took hold: firing 31 assistant DAs, including prosecutors in homicide; declining or diverting some gun-possession and low-level cases; and changing cash bail for certain offenses.
The Senate never tried him. After courts questioned whether the charges met the standard for “misbehavior in office,” the state Supreme Court held that the articles died with the legislative session. He was never removed.
The ballroom line was more of the same projection. It followed a string of public confrontations, including one in which Krasner grabbed the phone of a 22-year-old Republican student activist who was recording him.
In January 2026 Krasner called ICE agents “wannabe Nazis” and vowed to “hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades.”
In March he stood at Philadelphia International Airport and warned agents that “the president cannot pardon you” and that he would put them “in handcuffs” and, “if necessary,” a jail cell. The January remarks drew calls from members of Congress for a Justice Department review.
Separately this year, a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court faulted his office’s handling of post-conviction concessions in murder cases, finding a pattern of unreliable concessions, lack of candor, withheld evidence, and a false stipulation, and requiring the state attorney general to receive notice before future Philadelphia PCRA concessions are granted.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed records on the office’s immigration-related charging practices after months of non-production.
Same playbook since 2017. Call the other side hateful and ignorant, treat courthouses and public buildings like a stage set, and promise taxpayers a rebate while a company he co-owned was late paying the school district. Institutions aren’t scenery. This was just for attention.
