Don’t try telling Donald Trump that all that glitters is not gold.
Since returning to the White House one year ago, the president has often invoked past commanders in chief as models for some of his more controversial actions or policies.
He frequently cites William McKinley to justify his profligate use of tariffs and has spoken adoringly of Andrew Jackson and other expansionist presidents who acquired new territory for the U.S. — as he would like to do by possibly annexing Greenland.
But for those who pay attention to what’s going on in and around the White House’s historic walls, Trump’s first year back in power may well bring to mind another name, that of the Greek mythological ruler, King Midas.
And much like Midas is known for his mythic ability to turn anything he touched into gold, Trump has singlehandedly transformed the White House’s most iconic spaces by discarding their spartan but tasteful décor for what the New York Times has called a “maximalist” approach to interior design, heavy on the yellow precious metal that is also a hallmark of his Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago homesteads.
Since it was constructed more than 100 years ago as past of the addition of the West Wing to the White House, the Oval Office has been among the most iconic places in the country.
As presidents have come and gone, they have added or removed paintings and furniture to make the space to their liking — often by choosing from a number of oval-shaped carpets and different colors of drapes available to them in a catalog that is presented to them during the transition period between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
During the madcap scramble to move former President Joe Biden out and Trump back in last January, White House staff replaced the blue rug used by Biden with the taupe-colored one Trump (and his predecessor Barack Obama) had used.
They also restored the room to what largely approximated the condition it had been in when Trump reluctantly moved out four years earlier after losing the 2020 election to Biden.
Workers removed the massive portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt that Biden had kept on the wall and brought back flags of all five U.S. military branches that had been there during Trump’s previous term.
Combined with a number of American flags and the dark-blue presidential flag — the one that adorns his armored limousine as he is driven about the city — there are now 10 flags in the room, five times as many as most other chief executives.
The gold curtains and wallpaper that had been there for Biden remained in place — those were both first installed during Trump’s first term.
And on the president’s iconic desk, hewed from timbers salvaged from the British antarctic exploration ship H.M.S. Resolute, workers restored the infamous valet button which Trump famously uses to summon fresh glasses of Diet Coke.
A model of Air Force One, decked out in the red, dark blue and white color scheme Trump favors — one panned by the Air Force because it would be far more expensive and tax the aircraft’s cooling systems — returned to a coffee table in front of the room’s fireplace. It first appeared during Trump’s prior term and followed him back to his Mar-a-Lago residence during his four years in political exile in Florida.
But as the months of Trump’s madcap first year back in the seat of power unfolded, something else began to appear on the Oval Office’s walls, slowly creeping up like ivy until there was hardly any surface untouched. That was gold and golden adornments.
First, what the president claimed was pure gold leaf paint began to appear on previously white surfaces — doorways, crown molding and the Great Seal of the United States that has long been installed in relief on the ceiling of the room.
It spread to picture frames, which multiplied to fill seemingly any blank wall space as the president added more and more art from the government’s voluminous collection to his office — including a centuries-old copy of the Declaration of Independence that was added over objections of National Archives preservation experts who warned that hanging the document could cause it to fade. That necessitated a set of blackout curtains to shield from the sunlight filtering in through the windows behind the president’s desk.
Where there wasn’t enough room for photos, garish appliqués and tchotchkes appeared, like the vermeil medallions and vases on the mantelpiece where, since the Ford administration, there’d been a Swedish Ivy plant below a portrait of George Washington.
At least two gilded decorations — angel statuettes now visible above a pair of doorways — were brought to the White House from Mar-a-Lago, which he shifted from his native New York during his first term.
All told, an analysis of the room’s surfaces by the New York Times found that roughly 33 percent of the Oval Office walls, doorways, molding and ceiling is now covered in gold, which according to a White House official has been applied by John Icart, a Florida-based craftsman who Trump refers to as his “gold guy” and who he has employed at Mar-a-Lago for years — at the president’s own expense.
The shift in decor from the muted, even utilitarian style the room was kept in until Trump’s makeover began reflects the 47th president’s taste for decorations more fit for the late French monarch Louis XIV than the elected chief executive of a republic.
But the president has defended his new-look Oval Office as a necessary improvement. In March, he told Fox News that the room had needed “a little life.”
And his crowded makeover of the White House has not been confined to the Oval Office.
He gave the Cabinet Room the same treatment several months ago, adding gilded wall decorations and more gold-framed art to the iconic space.
Outside the West Wing, there have been more additions, changes — and some destruction as well.
In June of last year, he proudly supervised installation of two 100-foot flagpoles — one on the North Lawn and one on the White House’s South Lawn — each bearing massive American flags that dwarf the one that always flies atop the building. Unlike a similar installation outside his Florida home — which attracted the ire of local authorities — he faced no bureaucratic obstacles to erecting either flagpole on the White House grounds.
Two months later, Trump left preservationists aghast when he ordered contractors to dig up the iconic grass space immediately outside, the rose garden that had been planted there since the Kennedy administration.
Although administration officials took pains at the time to stress that the rose bushes that had defined the space were left untouched, the large grass space that has long been used for press conferences and other events was replaced with a white stone patio — complete with tables and umbrellas that echo the patio at Mar-a-Lago where the president often holds court during his frequent visits there.
Trump has since made ample use of the new-look space, which he has dubbed the “Rose Garden Club,” for lunches and dinners he’s hosted for Republican allies and donors.
And next to the newly-built patio, there’s even more newly-added Trumpian flourishes.
On the iconic colonnade that covers the path Trump uses to get from the White House residence to the West Wing each day, Trump has installed photos of each of his predecessors — plus two for each of his and Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms — as part of what he calls the “Presidential Walk of Fame.”
Under each photo, Trump has installed small plaques detailing each president’s record — with his recent predecessors described in demeaning and partisan terms.
He also used the installation to take a swipe at Biden, the only person to defeat him in an election, by refusing to hang a portrait of him and using a photograph of an autopen signing Biden’s signature in his place.
Above and in between the framed portraits are more gold appliqué installations, and above those is a large sign rendered in brass reminding everyone that they’re looking at the “Presidential Walk of Fame.”
And on the colonnade itself? Another sign, spelling out: “The Rose Garden.”
There’s yet a third sign — also rendered in a typeface that largely resembles the signage at Trump’s Florida club — indicating that the entrance to the Oval Office is in fact “The Oval Office.”
But the most dramatic change Trump has made to the White House hasn’t been to the West Wing or anywhere near it.
All the way on the other side of the 18-acre complex, between the White House itself and the Treasury Department building, there is now a gaping hole in the ground that was once the East Wing.
In July, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom — containing what she described as “a much-needed and exquisite addition” of “innately designed and carefully crafted space” — would begin in September.
She described the project as a “much-needed and exquisite addition” to the complex adjacent to what she called a “heavily changed and reconstructed” East Wing, though Trump later claimed that the ballroom would not “interfere” with the existing structure.
But Leavitt and Trump’s promises were not kept in the slightest.
In October, Americans were shocked by reports showing that demolition crews had rapidly knocked down the facade of the East Wing where visitors previously exited facing the Treasury building.
Days later, it became clear that the entire structure, which dated to the early 1900s, would be razed to the ground. And it was.
The historic structure, which was built in 1902 and given a second floor under then-president Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, had traditionally housed the Office of the First Lady and other parts of the White House, including the White House Travel Office and the White House Military Office.
It also sat atop a Second World War-era bunker that had been constructed for Roosevelt that was famously used by then-vice president Dick Cheney during the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
White House officials have justified the move by noting that the East Wing“has been renovated and changed many times,” including the 1942 renovation that added the second floor and the bomb shelter to the building.
According to the White House, the $400m ballroom structure is being funded by a slew of corporate entities and GOP donors, with Big Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft all chipping in.
Other notable contributors include the cryptocurrency businesses Coinbase and Ripple, the Winklevoss Twins, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Palantir Technologies, T-Mobile, Union Pacific Railroad, oil baron Harold Hamm, the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of the Glazer family, which owns Manchester United and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The entire enterprise has been called “an ethics nightmare” by George W Bush-era White House chief ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who told the BBC: “It’s using access to the White House to raise money. I don’t like it. These corporations all want something from the government.”
It also drew criticism from National Trust for Historic Preservation, which filed a lawsuit seeking to halt construction because the White House failed to provide plans to the commission and the Commission of Fine Arts for legally-mandated reviews after the White House bulldozed the East Wing to make room for the ballroom, which according to the president, could end up dwarfing the White House itself.
And if the architectural renderings of the space released by the administration are to be believed, there will definitely be lots of gold involved.
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