A George Soros-backed district attorney stood before a crowd and fantasized out loud about demolishing part of the White House.
Attorney General Todd Blanche fired back hard, and the exchange went national fast.
Now Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is defending every word he said about blowing up President Trump’s new White House ballroom — and the response from Washington tells you everything about who these people really are.
What Krasner Actually Said
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner made the remarks recently at the 24th annual slavery commemoration at the President’s House site in Old City, Philadelphia — a ceremony that should have carried its own gravity.
Instead, Krasner used the occasion to go after President Donald Trump and his White House ballroom project, a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot facility currently under construction where the East Wing once stood, designed to seat nearly 1,000 people for White House functions.
“In about 10 to 15 years, we are all going to be sitting here with smiles on our faces,” Krasner told the crowd.
“And I’m going to have a paperweight sitting on my desk. You know what that paperweight is gonna be? It’s gonna be a piece of a ballroom after we all blow it up. That’s what it’s gonna be.”
He clarified — if that word even applies — that the demolition would happen in what he called “an official ceremony,” with pieces of the rubble sold off to reimburse taxpayers. “Just so we’re clear, in an official ceremony, we’re gonna blow it up, and we’re going to give the taxpayers their money back by selling old pieces as paper weights,” Krasner said. “And I will have one on my desk.”
Krasner did not stop there. He called President Trump a “pain in the ass” during the same appearance. He went further, telling the crowd that Trump is “the embodiment of hate,” “the embodiment of ignorance,” and “the embodiment of depriving people of their vote and their education.”
According to reporting by Blaze Media, an audience member called Trump the devil, and Krasner agreed there was “some evidence” for it.
That is the chief prosecutor of one of America’s largest cities, at a public event, fantasizing about blowing up part of the White House and nodding along when someone calls the sitting president the devil.
Blanche Did Not Let It Slide
Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom and went straight at Krasner.
“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 noted that the US Supreme Court had recently allowed construction to proceed while litigation over the project continues. The project had been briefly paused after US District Judge Richard Leon attempted to halt it, but the Supreme Court cleared the way forward.
And Krasner’s response to Blanche’s rebuke? He told reporters he stands by his initial comments “100%” because, in his words, “when you demolish a building, you do it with explosives and/or wrecking balls.”
So he is not walking anything back. He is doubling down and explaining the mechanics of demolition to the Attorney General of the United States.
Who Larry Krasner Is — and What He Has Done to Philadelphia
None of this happens in a vacuum. Krasner did not wander in off the street. He was installed in the Philadelphia DA’s office in 2017 with the help of roughly $1.7 million in independent spending from a political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros, according to reporting by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Within days of taking office, Krasner fired 31 career prosecutors, many from the homicide division, and ordered his staff to decline charging entire categories of crimes.
The Pennsylvania House impeached Krasner in 2022 and labeled his office “purposefully ineffective” in combating violent crime.
In the three years before his tenure began, Philadelphia averaged 290 homicides annually. Under his leadership, that figure surged to 428 homicides annually from 2018 through 2024, according to the Heritage Foundation. Auto thefts increased by 28%, commercial burglaries by 130%, and aggravated assaults by 42% over that same stretch.
But Krasner is spending his time at slavery commemorations dreaming about paperweights made from White House rubble.
This is the same man who, earlier this year, reportedly referred to ICE agents enforcing the law against criminal illegal aliens as “Nazis” and threatened them directly, saying according to reporting by RedState: “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities and we will find you.”
The pattern is not subtle. Krasner treats immigration enforcement officers as enemies and treats the White House as a future demolition project. He treats the city he was elected to protect as a backdrop for national political theater.
And the voters of Philadelphia keep re-electing him, which is its own story.
The Ballroom and the Broader Picture
The White House ballroom itself has become a flashpoint. The administration has said the project is funded entirely by private donations, with no taxpayer money required for the structure itself. The ballroom is not even scheduled to be completed until around September 2028, months before President Trump’s second term concludes — meaning it will largely benefit whoever comes next.
That detail does not seem to matter to Krasner or the broader left-wing apparatus that has made opposing anything Trump touches into a full-time occupation. The facility will seat nearly 1,000 people and includes a new bunker and security enhancements for the complex. But because Trump ordered it, Krasner wants to blow it up and keep a souvenir.
Blanche’s reaction — calling the remarks “disgusting” — was measured compared to what a lot of Americans probably thought when they heard a sitting district attorney use the phrase “we all blow it up” while describing a building on the White House grounds.
Words from prosecutors carry weight. They are supposed to. A district attorney who casually deploys demolition language about federal property while fantasizing about a future change of political power is not engaging in clever rhetoric. He is signaling something about how he views the rule of law and the limits of his office.
Krasner has spent years demonstrating that he views his job as a vehicle for left-wing political transformation rather than as a responsibility to the people of Philadelphia. The ballroom comments are not an aberration. They are the logical extension of a career built on treating law enforcement as the enemy and political opponents as targets.
Attorney General Blanche put it plainly: the city of Philadelphia has its own problems. Those problems include a homicide rate that surged dramatically under Krasner’s watch, a police force that has seen officers quit in record numbers, and a prosecution record that the Pennsylvania House of Representatives found so deficient it moved to impeach him.
But the DA of Philadelphia is busy planning his paperweight collection.
The left-wing political class has spent years insisting that language from the Right is dangerous and must be policed. The same crowd that demanded accountability for every heated word from Trump supporters has nothing to say when their own officials stand at a national monument and talk about blowing up the White House.
That double standard is not new. It is the operating principle of the progressive legal movement that Soros spent hundreds of millions of dollars installing across American cities. The rules apply to one side. The other side gets to fantasize about demolition ceremonies and call it political speech.
Blanche is right that the ballroom is being built. And Krasner can plan his paperweight display all he wants. But the voters who sent President Trump back to Washington in 2024 already registered their verdict on the people who think this kind of performance is what public service looks like.
Sources: Breitbart; NBC10 Philadelphia; Washington Times; Washington Examiner; The Hill; Blaze Media; RedState; Heritage Foundation; Philadelphia Inquirer