“CNN This Morning” anchor Audie Cornish appeared taken aback on Friday, September 4, 2026, when New York Magazine reporter Ben Terris relayed what President Donald Trump told him after being confronted with a senator’s blunt theory about why the president is stamping Washington, D.C., with monuments to himself: the senator, Trump conceded, had it right.
Terris joined the program to walk through his latest reporting on the president’s drive to plant new landmarks across the capital, a building spree that includes the contentious $400 million White House ballroom — construction the Supreme Court has allowed the White House to continue — and a triumphal arch.
Ossoff’s Line, Put to the President
At a campaign rally in Atlanta in May, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) framed the projects as pure self-tribute, saying Trump was putting up tributes to himself now because he expected nobody would bother to do it for him later. Ossoff called him “a failed president and a national disgrace.”
Cornish, who read the senator’s remarks aloud, wanted to know whether the reporter sitting across from her had taken the charge straight to its target. “Now, did I read right, that you put that exact quote to him?” Cornish asked.
Terris said he had paraphrased the senator when he posed the question to the president. “I said, ‘Senator Jon Ossoff said that you’re building monuments to yourself because nobody’s going to do it when you’re gone. How do you respond to that?'” Terris recounted. “And he said, ‘He’s right. Nobody else would do it. I’m the only one who would do it once I’m gone.'”
The reporter added that the exchange showed a president weighing what he leaves behind. That, Cornish offered, must mean Trump is intent on leaving those marks behind before his time in the White House runs out. Terris pushed back, arguing that the president appears to have something larger than the end of a term on his mind — his own mortality, and the idea that he might stick around, in some form, indefinitely.
Names, Columns and a Ballroom
In his article, Terris wrote that Trump laid out fresh ideas during a reporter’s tour of the White House. Among them: possibly affixing his own name to the new ballroom, and “fixing” the mansion’s front columns with acanthus leaves to make them look more ornate.
The president’s response to Ossoff followed another eyebrow-raising remark in March, when Trump said the U.S. military is building a “massive complex” underneath the ballroom.
What the Polling Shows
Cornish pointed to a CNN-SSRS poll conducted in July, in which 58 percent of the 1,225 U.S. adults surveyed said they were dissatisfied or angry about the president’s construction and renovation projects. Plenty of other voters, she noted, simply don’t understand why any of it should matter to them.
Terris countered that he has met people who care intensely about the projects. One of them is Norm Eisen, who served as an ethics lawyer in the White House while Barack Obama was president and has accused Trump of apparent corruption time and again. Terris said Eisen views the remaking of the capital as important precisely because it functions as a metaphor for the way Trump is governing.
The president is unbound, Terris said — not heeding the Constitution or the courts, with the opposition party unable to stop him. If a viewer wants a physical embodiment of that approach, he added, it is visible in how Washington is being rebuilt.
A New Promise, and New Doubts
On Monday, September 7, Cornish moderated a panel discussion about the president’s decision to dispatch envoys to Moscow and Kyiv.
Trump made another pledge. Speaking on Wednesday night, September 9, at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, the 80-year-old president floated $5,000 “dividend” checks for every adult American citizen, saying he would issue them only if Republicans hold their congressional majorities in the midterm elections. Vice President JD Vance made a comparable pitch on Fox News on Tuesday, September 8, saying American workers are owed rebates from the tariffs Trump has imposed on foreign trading partners.
Panelists on “CNN This Morning” were unconvinced. Meghan Hays, a former Biden White House staffer, dismissed the pledges as empty promises, saying they cost nothing to make when the person making them does not expect to have to deliver, and that they may pick up a few votes from people who aren’t following closely. Cornish flagged a complication of her own: one of the Supreme Court’s rulings forced a refund of tariff money, she said, and companies that collected rebate checks kept the money rather than passing it to consumers. With that pool badly damaged for legal reasons, she said, she isn’t sure where the revenue for such checks would come from.