President Donald Trump has been on a depressingly successful run of wrecking the White House, turning it into Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac, and covering everything in gold as regular Americans struggle.
This is, it should go without saying, not normal. While other presidents have put their stylistic stamp on the White House, that often involved things like getting new drapes or switching out the carpet, not slapping up gold-painted plaster seals on nearly every surface. There are lots of far more important Day 1 jobs when the Democrats retake the White House, but honestly, tearing a bunch of this stuff off the walls and getting a competent painting crew in is up there.
Though we can’t yet take a sledgehammer to this garbage, we can chart its progression from moderately tacky at the start of Trump’s second term to its current unhinged excess—which will no doubt get even worse.
Things looked semi-normal back in January 2025, with only a smattering of gold showing up. The walls were not yet slathered in the kind of decorations you buy when you want to make the game room at a senior living facility look fancy.
By July 2025, though, the walls were a hodgepodge of gold-framed paintings and random fancy golden shapes, along with what looks like an oddly large amount of cups—goblets?—atop the fireplace mantle.
The fall of 2025 brought us crisp weather, the opportunity to maybe don a sweater, and an Oval Office rapidly being overtaken by fancy shapes mounted on doors and walls. Peep the portrait of former President Ronald Reagan smiling vaguely, looming over everyone.
In the winter, it appeared that the Oval Office was, at least for the moment, maxed out on gold crap, so Trump had his decorating crew stick up stuff on the exterior, where it manages to look even tackier than it does in the White House.
New year, new gold. By the spring of 2026, the master builder was running out of wall space, forcing him to erect some sort of gold monstrosity within the fireplace itself.
That brings us to the present day, where there may or may not be more gold garbage on the fireplace. (It’s getting tough to tell by now.) But Trump did get himself a fancy lil model airplane, presumably a little trinket meant to evoke his Qatari bribe plane.
Things used to be so much simpler. And so much less ugly. And so much less embarrassing. Check out the low-key classic styling of former President John F. Kennedy Jr.
Former President Richard Nixon was a liar, a racist, and a cheat, but his Oval Office looked perfectly normal.
Former President Jimmy Carter held office at the height of the 1970s, not exactly a terrific time for interior design, but even he just put up some vases rather than stapling peanuts to the walls or something.
When Reagan had then-President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev visit in 1987, he somehow managed to put an actual fire in the fireplace rather than stuffing it with gold crap.
Do you remember the Oval Office under former President Barack Obama? It looked like a stylish, albeit a bit fussy, sitting room, one you could imagine being in without worrying you might get gold paint on your trousers.
And finally, here’s what the Oval looked like when then-President Joe Biden was getting ready to turn the keys over to Trump.
Hey, would you look at that? Wallpaper you can see clearly! A fire in the fireplace! Some simple greenery on the mantle!
We used to be a proper country. We used to have a proper president. We used to have a proper Oval Office. Someday, hopefully soon, we will again.
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Lisa Needham
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