Latest news with #ResoluteDesk
Vancouver Sun
4 days ago
- Politics
- Vancouver Sun
Replica Oval Office near the White House gets Trump makeover
WASHINGTON — A replica Oval Office on display near the White House now looks exactly like President Donald Trump's. But it is not the blingy version he is currently using. Visitors can now experience the mock Oval Office as it was in the Republican president's first term, until it is redecorated again next year to incorporate the golden touches and other flourishes Trump brought to the workspace after he returned to power in January. 'Just like the White House itself, our Oval Office is a living space, so it changes and evolves as the actual Oval Office changes,' Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association, said. Plan your next getaway with Travel Time, featuring travel deals, destinations and gear. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Travel Time will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The mock-up is inside 'The People's House: A White House Experience,' an educational center the association opened last year one block west of the Executive Mansion. Few regular people ever see, let alone step inside, the real Oval Office, for security and other reasons. But the true-to-life model offers visitors a chance to see and experience it. It will be updated to match the decor of every sitting president. When the historical association opened the center last year, the replica Oval Office looked like Democrat Joe Biden's office because he was the president at the time. The association has to get copies made of every item in the real Oval Office and that process takes time, McLaurin said. He also preferred to wait until there was a 'critical mass' of items instead of doing a slow, piece-by-piece makeover. Trump decorated his first-term Oval Office with a beige-patterned rug from the Ronald Reagan era, gold-colored draperies from Bill Clinton's tenure and a lighter, floral wallpaper that replaced a striped wall covering installed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump kept these same designs for his second term. Trump also kept the Resolute Desk, which has been used by nearly every president since it was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Queen Victoria. It was built using wood from the British ship HMS Resolute. Trump hung a large portrait of George Washington above the fireplace, flanked by portraits of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. He also displayed portraits of Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin and had busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Winston Churchill on tables on either side of the fireplace. The association is in the process of reproducing items in Trump's second-term office even as he continues to make changes by adding gilding, artwork and other objects. 'So probably in a year or a little more, we'll be able to make that transition when we have all of those items ready,' McLaurin said. The Biden items will be donated to his foundation for possible use in his future presidential library, and the same will be done in the future with the items reproduced for Trump's offices. The White House Historical Association was created in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to help preserve the museum quality of the interior of the White House and educate the public. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that receives no government funding. It raises money mostly through private donations and merchandise sales, including an annual Christmas ornament.
Hamilton Spectator
5 days ago
- Politics
- Hamilton Spectator
A replica Oval Office near the White House just got a Trump makeover
WASHINGTON (AP) — A replica Oval Office on display near the White House now looks exactly like President Donald Trump's. But it is not the blingy version he is currently using. Visitors starting Thursday will experience the mock Oval Office as it was in the Republican president's first term, until it is redecorated again next year to incorporate the golden touches and other flourishes Trump brought to the workspace after he returned to power in January. 'Just like the White House itself, our Oval Office is a living space, so it changes and evolves as the actual Oval Office changes,' Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association, said Wednesday as he led The Associated Press on a tour of the space as it was being revamped. The mock-up is inside 'The People's House: A White House Experience,' an educational center the association opened last year one block west of the Executive Mansion. Few regular people ever see, let alone step inside, the real Oval Office, for security and other reasons. But the true-to-life model offers visitors a chance to see and experience it. It will be updated to match the decor of every sitting president. When the historical association opened the center last year, the replica Oval Office looked like Democrat Joe Biden's office because he was the president at the time. The association has to get copies made of every item in the real Oval Office and that process takes time, McLaurin said. He also preferred to wait until there was a 'critical mass' of items instead of doing a slow, piece-by-piece makeover. Trump decorated his first-term Oval Office with a beige-patterned rug from the Ronald Reagan era, gold-colored draperies from Bill Clinton's tenure and a lighter, floral wallpaper that replaced a striped wall covering installed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump kept these same designs for his second term. Trump also kept the Resolute Desk , which has been used by nearly every president since it was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Queen Victoria. It was built using wood from the British ship HMS Resolute. Trump hung a large portrait of George Washington above the fireplace, flanked by portraits of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. He also displayed portraits of Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin and had busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Winston Churchill on tables on either side of the fireplace. The association is in the process of reproducing items in Trump's second-term office even as he continues to make changes by adding gilding, artwork and other objects. 'So probably in a year or a little more, we'll be able to make that transition when we have all of those items ready,' McLaurin said. The Biden items will be donated to his foundation for possible use in his future presidential library, and the same will be done in the future with the items reproduced for Trump's offices. The White House Historical Association was created in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to help preserve the museum quality of the interior of the White House and educate the public. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that receives no government funding. It raises money mostly through private donations and merchandise sales, including an annual Christmas ornament. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Winnipeg Free Press
5 days ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
A replica Oval Office near the White House just got a Trump makeover
WASHINGTON (AP) — A replica Oval Office on display near the White House now looks exactly like President Donald Trump's. But it is not the blingy version he is currently using. Visitors starting Thursday will experience the mock Oval Office as it was in the Republican president's first term, until it is redecorated again next year to incorporate the golden touches and other flourishes Trump brought to the workspace after he returned to power in January. 'Just like the White House itself, our Oval Office is a living space, so it changes and evolves as the actual Oval Office changes,' Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association, said Wednesday as he led The Associated Press on a tour of the space as it was being revamped. The mock-up is inside 'The People's House: A White House Experience,' an educational center the association opened last year one block west of the Executive Mansion. Few regular people ever see, let alone step inside, the real Oval Office, for security and other reasons. But the true-to-life model offers visitors a chance to see and experience it. It will be updated to match the decor of every sitting president. When the historical association opened the center last year, the replica Oval Office looked like Democrat Joe Biden's office because he was the president at the time. The association has to get copies made of every item in the real Oval Office and that process takes time, McLaurin said. He also preferred to wait until there was a 'critical mass' of items instead of doing a slow, piece-by-piece makeover. Trump decorated his first-term Oval Office with a beige-patterned rug from the Ronald Reagan era, gold-colored draperies from Bill Clinton's tenure and a lighter, floral wallpaper that replaced a striped wall covering installed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump kept these same designs for his second term. Trump also kept the Resolute Desk, which has been used by nearly every president since it was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Queen Victoria. It was built using wood from the British ship HMS Resolute. Trump hung a large portrait of George Washington above the fireplace, flanked by portraits of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. He also displayed portraits of Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin and had busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Winston Churchill on tables on either side of the fireplace. The association is in the process of reproducing items in Trump's second-term office even as he continues to make changes by adding gilding, artwork and other objects. 'So probably in a year or a little more, we'll be able to make that transition when we have all of those items ready,' McLaurin said. The Biden items will be donated to his foundation for possible use in his future presidential library, and the same will be done in the future with the items reproduced for Trump's offices. The White House Historical Association was created in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to help preserve the museum quality of the interior of the White House and educate the public. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that receives no government funding. It raises money mostly through private donations and merchandise sales, including an annual Christmas ornament.
New Statesman
7 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The Epstein conspiracy has unmasked Trump as a faux-populist
Photo bySo it was a conspiracy theory about a dead paedophilic financier who Tucker Carlson thinks was a Mossad agent and with whom Donald Trump used to ogle young women at Mar-a-Lago parties that finally cracked the marriage between the president and the Maga movement. Who'd have thought it? Conspiracy theories are not a bite-sized hors d'oeuvre in Maga world; they are the main course. That it was the Jeffrey Epstein scandal – not cuts to healthcare, lower taxes on the rich, or a bombing raid on Iran – that unmasked Trump to some of his followers as a faux populist and member of the elite shows that these theories are the pistons powering the movement. The reason is that conspiracy theories substitute the material for the symbolic. They can serve as allegories for real injustices. The hardcore Maga base elected Trump to reveal the corrupt cabal that was tricking America into decadent decline. He was the captain of their resistance. 'Trump's return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis [unveiling] of the ancien régime's secrets,' Peter Thiel wrote hopefully before the inauguration. But then Trump told them to shut up. Trump overruled Attorney General Pam Bondi's promise to release the files on Epstein. He told his followers not to 'waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about'. He wanted them to look the other way. Their crusader for truth was telling them all to go back home. Parts of his online fanbase now whisper that perhaps Trump himself is in the Epstein files. For that to be the case, Trump would have had to have made a reckless bet: that he could talk up the conspiracy for years in order to sully his rivals – such as fellow Epstein associate Bill Clinton – without his own role ever coming out. It would be kamikaze politics if it weren't so self-serving. Trump might lose his bet. For the first time, the president and his online gang are looking at each other across the dinner table with faces shadowed by betrayal. Trump barters myths in exchange for votes. He got the Resolute Desk; his base got a Manichean world-view that split society into good and bad, the Elite and the People. But, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the final months of the Soviet Union, he let loose forces that might, if not presage his downfall, then at least become impossible to control. Call it Perestroika for paedophiles. Why is it the Epstein files, and not countless other conspiracies, that have caused Trump such grief? Because there are many real questions about Epstein that anyone interested in justice for the victims of one of the most infamous sexual predators of the century should want answers to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Where did his fortune come from, for instance? Why was the metadata of the surveillance video outside the cell where he supposedly killed himself tampered with? Why was he left alone when his jailers knew he was a suicide risk? Why did the prosecutor, who went on to become Trump's labour secretary, give Epstein such a lenient sentence when he was first arrested in 2006? These questions could give the Epstein story the legs to unbalance Trump for the remainder of his term. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published extracts that it claimed were from a birthday letter that Trump wrote to Epstein in 2003, complete with a lewd drawing and the message 'Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.' Now Trump is suing the paper and its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, for $10bn. The two billionaires have gracelessly pirouetted around each other for decades. In 1992 Trump might have flicked to page six of the New York Post to read stories about his divorce from Ivana. Back in 2016 when News Corp executives would parse his tweets like a daily horoscope, Murdoch weighed in after reports that Trump was irritated by an unflattering WSJ poll. 'Time to calm down,' Murdoch posted, when he still used Twitter. 'If I [am] running anti-Trump conspiracy then [I'm] doing [a] lousy job!' Days before the WSJ story hit, Murdoch was spotted in Trump's box at the Fifa Club World Cup. It was a reminder of Trump's years spent inside the media elite, as a cartoon figure who Murdoch's papers eagerly saw as a willing collaborator. Their meeting marked Trump out as a man from a previous age, a tribune of the people with friends in high places: something his successors will note to avoid. Murdoch was once considered the great Satan of high-class liberalism. Trump knocked him off that perch. But the president now has enemies to his right. There is a hinterland beyond Trump far more extreme than the president himself. At one event at a conservative conference in February, diehard Trump fans who had come from around the country were asked to raise their hands if they still watched Fox News. In a crowd of hundreds, I saw one or two hands go up. They were met with a few derisive laughs. These Trump followers preferred more conspiratorial channels such as NewsNation and Real America's Voice. The Epstein saga roils Washington as its wiser residents flee the seasonal heat. In the sunlight, the city's rats lie inert on the pavements from the sauna-like temperatures. Trump was sent to drain the swamp, but some in his movement are now asking whether he always quite liked the grime. [See more: Why do right-wing 'transvestigators' believe Michelle Obama is a man?] Related
Mint
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Trump marks Butler assassination attempt anniversary: US President's inner circle says ‘he believes he's spared by God'
Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime friend of Trump, said the incident continues to weigh heavily on the President. 'I think it's always in the back of his mind,' Graham said. 'He's still a rough and tumble guy… But he's more appreciative. He's more attentive to his friends.' Graham added, 'It's just a miracle he's not dead. He definitely was a man who believed he had a second lease on life.' Longtime adviser Roger Stone said Trump has become 'more serene and more determined' since the attack. 'He told me directly that he believed he was spared by God for the purpose of restoring the nation to greatness.' Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, agreed that the event had a profound impact. 'He knew he was lucky to be alive,' said Reed. 'It's hard not to feel on some level that the hand of providence protected him for some greater purpose.' Rather than shy away from reminders of the attack, Trump has embraced it as a symbol of his resilience. A painting of him standing after the shooting, fist raised in defiance, now hangs in the White House foyer. A bronze sculpture of the same moment sits in the Oval Office beside the Resolute Desk. Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff and former campaign head, said in a podcast interview last week that Trump 'walked away from the shooting believing he had been spared for a reason.' She credited divine intervention, explaining how Trump's decision to ask for a particular chart at a certain moment caused him to turn his head just enough to avoid a fatal shot. 'That just doesn't happen because it happened,' she said. 'It happened because, I believe, God wanted him to live.' According to Wiles, Trump's expressions like 'God bless America' have since taken on deeper meaning. 'It's more profound with him now, and it's more personal.' Trump frequently references the event in speeches and has even credited a border chart—a visual aid he turned to moments before the shot—with saving his life. 'I get that throbbing feeling every once in a while,' he told reporters last month, pointing to his ear. 'But you know what, that's OK. This is a dangerous business. What I do is a dangerous business.' In a Fox News interview airing Saturday, Trump himself acknowledged that the experience left a lasting imprint. 'I have an obligation to do a good job, I feel, because I was really saved,' he said. 'I owe a lot. And I think—I hope—the reason I was saved was to save our country.' Trump will spend the anniversary of the Butler shooting attending the FIFA Club World Cup final in New Jersey. He and Melania Trump are expected at MetLife Stadium for the match between Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea—an event viewed as a preview of the 2026 World Cup, which North America will co-host. On July 10, the US Secret Service confirmed that six agents had been suspended for failing to prevent the 2024 Butler attack. The shooter had accessed a rooftop with an unimpeded line of sight to Trump. The agency, under intense scrutiny, said the suspensions ranged from 10 to 42 days. Director Sean Curran has since resigned. 'There were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened,' Trump said in the Fox interview, pointing out the lack of rooftop surveillance and communication failures with local police. The Secret Service says it has implemented 21 of 46 oversight recommendations, with 16 more in progress. It's also ramping up protective measures, including new protocols for golf courses—a nod to another thwarted attack just two months after Butler, when a man with a rifle was spotted near one of Trump's Florida properties.
