Another day, another pompous and passive-aggressive editorial by CBS’s John Dickerson to close out the Evening News Plus. This time, viewers were subjected to Dickerson’s grand pensées on the just-announced White House Ballroom.
Watch the editorial in its entirety, as aired on CBS Evening News Plus on Thursday, July 31st, 2025:
JOHN DICKERSON: President Trump’s plan to build a $200 million ballroom at The White House, funded by private donations, brings to mind one of the greatest episodes in the history of White House splendor, a moment when fancy furnishings helped decide a presidency. It's known as The Gold Spoon Oration. In 1840, President Martin Van Buren ran for reelection. The economy had collapsed. His opponents wanted to turn the trappings of his office into a vulnerability. Charles Ogle, a Whig congressman from Pennsylvania, rose to address Congress about a routine appropriation for White House upkeep. He kept speaking over three days. He called Van Buren “a Democratic peacock in full court costume, strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors nine feet high and 4.5ft wide.” Laughter and applause rippled from the crowd, drawn to the spectacle. Ogle said the president's soul was so very, very, very diminutive it could pirouette inside a thimble. He called Van Buren “Sweet Sandy Whiskers”, referring to the shrubbery on his face. The name stuck. The official title of the speech was The Regal Splendor of the President's Palace. Its nickname came from an anecdote about a Kentucky congressman dining at The White House, who lifted a gold spoon and told Van Buren, “if you will let me take this spoon to Kentucky and show it to my constituents, I will promise not to make use of any other argument against you. This will be enough.” What started as an attack on wasting public money became a festival of mockery, where tall tales of decadence painted the president as out of touch with the common man. Van Buren lost the election. The trappings of the office, including the spoons, were then conveyed to the next 38 occupants.
The ballroom is going to be privately funded by President Donald Trump, among other donors. But this didn’t stop Dickerson from going back nearly 200 years to find something he thought was historically comparable.
The editorial was little more than a diatribe thinly disguised as a high-minded history lesson. But Dickerson’s literary-historical flex is somewhat inaccurate.
Many of Van Buren’s White House upgrades were privately funded, as is the case with the upcoming ballroom commissioned by Trump. The smear effectively cost Van Buren the presidency, and it’s pretty obvious what Dickerson is trying to establish here.
Dickerson gave the game away right at the beginning: “His opponents wanted to turn the trappings of his office into a vulnerability.” So, too, is Dickerson, nearly two hundred years later.
