2 days ago
White House decor has stirred debate before. Then came Trump.
Almost as long as this has been a nation, there have been disagreements over the grandeur and style in which its leader should live.
Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the French-born architect and engineer who laid out the plan for the capital city in 1791, envisioned a spectacular presidential palace. George Washington overruled that idea and chose instead the more modest yet stately Georgian-style design of Irishman James Hoban, which was a quarter of the size of L'Enfant's proposal.
Over the centuries, changes to the executive mansion's scale and design have often triggered sensitivity. When Abraham Lincoln learned of the enormous cost overruns his wife, Mary, had incurred for furniture, carpets and drapes, he erupted in fury at what he called 'flub dubs for that damned old house!'
And so imagine what the humble lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, might think of the White House makeover that its current occupant has been undertaking.
Donald Trump has covered practically every surface of the Oval Office in gold: medallions on the fireplace, urns on the mantle, moldings on the doors and walls, a crowded gallery of gilt-framed portraits. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has called it 'the Golden Office for the Golden Age.'
He has turned the famed and historic Rose Garden into a concrete patio, modeled after the one at his beloved gold-themed Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, but drawing social media ridicule as looking like the seating area at a Panera Bread.
Most ambitiously, Trump has announced plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for a $200-million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom. That, too, echoes the gold-and-white one he added at Mar-a-Lago, though the White House version will be more than quintuple the size.
Questions of taste aside, critics see these projects as exemplars of more significant hallmarks of Trump's presidency.
'I dislike it on its face, but what's much more disturbing is this notion that Trump seems to have, which is, of course, consistent with his general view of government,' said historian John A. Lawrence, who served as chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) when she was House speaker.
'I think it speaks to the motive at the same time he is agglomerating power around and within the executive branch, to a manner that we have not seen from any president of either party,' Lawrence added. 'It seems to me this is more than tinkering with design. It's more than putting a little gold leaf on the fireplace of the White House. It's really sending a message of a monarchical, autocratic concept of what the job is and what his role is.'
Americans have long felt an ownership of and pride in the White House, which is one of the few residences of a head of state that is regularly open to the public. About 10,000 people take the tour each week.
First lady Jacqueline Kennedy complained that the White House she moved into in 1961 'looked like it's been furnished by discount stores.' Few of those furnishings dated back further than the 1940s. When she unveiled her sumptuous renovation on national television a year later, an estimated 80 million viewers tuned in, and she was awarded an honorary Emmy.
'Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there,' Kennedy said in an interview with Life Magazine's Hugh Sidey. 'It would be sacrilege merely to 'redecorate' it — a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.'
This, however, was in the glow of Camelot. Nancy Reagan, on the other hand, provoked an enormous backlash when she embarked on a similar renovation two decades later. Though the executive residence was threadbare in parts, redecorating it was viewed as frivolous and extravagant at a time when the nation was enduring its worst recession since the Great Depression and her husband was cutting social programs.
Even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a joke about the first lady's political blunder as she offered a toast at the Reagans' first state dinner in 1981.
'I'm told, Mr. President, that when you and Mrs. Reagan were inspecting your new home to see what refurbishment was needed, you came across some charred areas, vestiges of certain heated events in 1812,' Thatcher said, referring to the British burning the White House during the war that began that year. 'I don't think I need to apologize for them, because I'm relieved to hear that Mrs. Reagan saw in this not a source of historical reproach, but an opportunity for redecoration.'
Through the years, the White House has been expanded and adapted to meet the needs of the times. And there are practical arguments to be made, for example, for a ballroom.
The State Dining Room holds 140 people, and the East Room just 200. That is too small to accommodate the invitation lists for some official dinners, which are tools of diplomacy as well as entertainment. Bigger gatherings, as Trump has often noted, have to be held in tents.
His fixation on a new White House ballroom long predated his presidency. President Barack Obama's former adviser, David Axelrod, recalls in his memoir, 'Believer,' that Trump called him in 2010 and said: 'I see you have these state dinners on the lawn there in these shitty little tents. Let me build you a ballroom you can assemble and take apart. Trust me. It'll look great.'
What is crucial with any major change to the White House, preservation experts say, is that it be made in keeping with the style and history of the building and its grounds. As Lawrence noted, 'the original designs of these buildings reflect sort of the underlying confidence in the institutions that they represent.'
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles promised in a statement announcing the project that Trump — 'a builder at heart' — would share that commitment.
'The President and the Trump White House are fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserving the special history of the White House while building a beautiful ballroom that can be enjoyed by future Administrations and generations of Americans to come,' Wiles said.
But alarms have been raised over the sheer scale of the project and the fact that Trump is rushing to break ground on the ballroom without submitting the project for review to the National Capital Planning Commission, which is required by law and can take years to complete.
What no doubt will come under scrutiny are the sources of funding for the project. Trump has said that he 'and other patriot donors' will come up with the money. However, they have provided few details as to how transparent that process will be.
The motives for donor generosity will also be questioned. It was noted, for instance, that oil executives chipped in $300,000 toward the cost of the Reagan renovation — more than one-third of the total — shortly after the president deregulated the price of petroleum.
Maybe what all of Trump's remodeling of his temporary home boils down to is this: The 47th president may be one of the few Americans who would consider living in the White House a privation.
During an interview with The Washington Post at Mar-a-Lago in 2016, Trump gestured around him and said: 'I give up a lot when I run. I gave up a life. I gave up this.'
Now, when he looks out the window of a gilded Oval Office at what used to be a Rose Garden, Trump may think he didn't have to after all.
