Donald Trump is back in the White House, and this time around, he’s done some major renovations. A home, any decent designer will tell you, should in its aesthetic reflect its inhabitants: Their lifestyles and their values. And Trump has certainly remade the White House in his image. It’s tacky, showy, and narcissistic—but luckily his changes don’t seem built to last.
The Trump White House also appears to have more gold in it than the Federal Reserve. It’s as if Liberace joined forces with Scrooge McDuck. Trump has added copious amounts of gold to every conceivable surface: More paintings with thick gold frames, more gold vases and urns and tchotchkes, even gold paint on the crown molding. There’s even a gold-framed New York Post cover with Trump’s mug shot on it.
The golden doorknobs are polished to maximum gleam; when shadow president Elon Musk showed up to his farewell event in the Oval Office (with a black eye), Trump handed him a golden key. He probably wants that back now but still. There are no reports of golden toilets—yet—but virtually no other surface seems untouched. “A gilded rococo hellscape” is how one photo editor and creative consultant described it in The New York Times. The president who purports to want to make America great again seems to actually want to turn the American capitol into Versailles.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told The Wall Street Journal that, “It’s the Golden Office for the Golden Age.” Really though, it’s more of a gilded office for a new gilded age: A time when the rich swill champagne in their mansions and members-only clubs while the masses suffer through profound political polarization and extreme inequality. Today, the world’s uber-wealthy can buy a Trump Gold Card—of course—visa to get into the US; immigrants who aren’t flush, on the other hand, see the doors slam shut.
Donald Trump has always loved the ostentatious and ornate. His apartments are notoriously gaudy, as are the buildings he slaps his name on (typically in huge gold letters). He first announced his presidential run a decade ago by descending on a golden escalator.
But it all seems to quickly lose its sheen. The Trump name is so deeply associated with grift and chintz that many once-affluent buyers have fled his building. When the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino imploded in Atlantic City after years of neglect, crowds gathered to cheer. This is not a man who builds things that last. This is a man who makes things shiny for as long as it takes him to cash his checks.
For all his new-money fixation on expensive, shiny things, Trump’s economic policies have badly tarnished his presidency. The president has managed to repeatedly roil global markets, earn a downgrade of America’s credit rating, raise consumer prices and make it impossible for businesses to adequately plan for anything; various tariffs have been removed and revised, put back and removed again, threatened and teased and so on. The back-and-forth has been so endless that Wall Streeters have a nickname for it: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out.
The president seems to now be saying he will negotiate individual trade deals with countries the world over, an endeavor that will at least keep him too busy to hang up any more gold-framed paintings of himself. (He has thus far been unable to make very few such deals, instead telling Americans they should simply expect to buy fewer toys for their children.)
But what else is Trump himself busy with? Cashing in. He’s started a small crypto empire, enjoying the spoils of those foolish enough to buy into his schemes, or canny enough to know buying in can get them access. A state-owned Emirati company has invested some $2 billion in one of the Trump family’s enterprises. He’s accepting a free luxury jet from Qatar. Unlike previous presidents, he has not put his own assets in a blind trust. He has used his position to extract free work from some of the country’s top law firms, which he has intimidated out of challenging him or his agenda. As his administration is cutting basic services for Americans, he’s trimming the White House with gold, and sitting on a growing pile of it.
The question now is what will come first: The flaking of the White House gold leaf, or the falling-apart of Trump’s presidency itself.
