A federal judge certainly didn’t dance around how he really felt about one of the Justice Department’s claims about President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project.

At a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon seemed generally unimpressed by the arguments made by the DOJ’s lawyers that Trump had the legal authority to demolish the entirety of the White House’s East Wing to erect his cartoonishly large event space without congressional approval, CNN reports.

But there was one argument so absurd that the judge couldn’t help but call it out.

The DOJ’s lawyers contended that a federal law already authorizes the president to make “alterations” and “improvements” to the White House “as the president may determine,” and then had the gall to characterize Trump’s ballroom project as merely an “alteration.”

Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, told the DOJ’s attorneys that labeling Trump’s extreme White House makeover as “an alteration… takes some brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary.”

Leon also got pretty miffed when a DOJ lawyer compared Trump’s pricy vanity project to past projects at national parks, the Washington Post reports.

Leon rejected the comparison by saying that the White House “is a special place.”

“This is an iconic symbol of this nation,” Leon added while noting that Trump is a “steward” of the White House, and not its owner.

The case came to the D.C. district court after the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States — a nonprofit that oversees the preservation of historic structures — asked Leon to issue a temporary injunction to halt construction until congressional approval is granted.

The judge said he would make his ruling by the end of March, and the White House said it wants to start aboveground construction of the ballroom by April, the Post notes.

“It would have been a heck of a lot easier by any standard to have just gone to Congress to get the authority to do it,” Leon said at one point during the hearing while he was reprimanding the government for its “shifting theories and shifting dynamics,” per CNN.

Leon’s remarks about the DOJ providing “shifting” justifications for the project make a lot more sense when you take into account that just last month, lawyers for the department said in a court filing that the ballroom has “national security implications” and that they will appeal any adverse decision.

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