Trump’s golden age of White House remodels echoes his real estate experience
Trump’s golden age of White House remodels echoes his real estate experience
President Donald Trump is bringing his New York real estate expertise and personal flair for remodeling to the White House and beyond during his second term.
The Oval Office now has a golden touch that’s hard to ignore after former President Joe Biden‘s more minimalist tenure. After construction, the Rose Garden is sporting a new look, reminiscent of Trump’s other real estate properties.
Trump is barreling forward on his plan to expand the White House through a new ballroom.
“I offered to build a ballroom. I’m very good at building ballrooms,” Trump said during a February event about his efforts to change the White House during Biden’s administration. Five months later, he has followed through with the announcement.
Trump is also transforming the visual images of Washington, D.C., after federalizing the city’s police and deploying the National Guard, a move that echoed his father, Fred Trump’s, desire for cleanliness.
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Beyond the United States, Trump has suggested he could bring his real estate experience to the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
The Washington Examiner traced several of Trump’s second-term visual changes to the White House.
The Oval Office is golden
Trump’s long-term penchant for gold extended to the Oval Office, where he has added several golden pieces in contrast to Biden’s design.
Trump added gold to the crown molding on the previously bare ceiling of the Oval Office. The fireplace has several golden decorations on the mantle that are prominently featured when he hosts bilateral meetings with foreign leaders. Next to the fireplace are two gold mirrors on either side of the mantle.
Trump also added several more portraits, with former President George Washington as the centerpiece of the images above the fireplace.
“Throughout the years, people have tried to come up with gold paint that would look like gold and they’ve never been able to do it,” Trump told Fox News in a tour of the Oval Office earlier this year. “You’ve never been able to match gold with gold paint. That’s why it’s gold.”
The Rose Garden gets a makeover, and in other areas, Trump is making his mark
One of the most drastic changes to the White House is Trump’s remodeling of the historic Rose Garden.
Gone is the green lawn under the Biden administration. Instead, the center section of the garden has been paved over with stone tiles.
“We’re getting great reviews on the rose garden,” Trump told reporters earlier this month about the remodeling.
Trump said the redesign was influenced in part by women in high heels struggling to walk in a March interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
“Every event you have, it’s soaking wet, and the women with the high heels, it’s just too much,” Trump said.
The garden also features the same patio furniture, including the yellow-striped umbrellas, used at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
However, the roses are still in the garden. In 1961, after returning from state visits in Europe, former President John F. Kennedy requested a redesign of the garden.
Trump has also installed two new flag poles on the White House’s North and South lawns, and late last month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the construction of a massive $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom extending from the East Wing.
In April, Trump said, “We’re putting up a beautiful, almost 100-foot-tall American flag. On this and another one on the other side. Two flags. Top of the line. And they’ve needed flagpoles for 200 years.”
Two months later, he bragged to reporters, “I love construction.”
Former presidential portraits get shunted
Trump removed former President Barack Obama’s White House portrait from the Grand Foyer in April and replaced it with the iconic photo of Trump’s fist pump after the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.
According to tradition, the two most recent presidential portraits are to be hung on either side of the Grand Foyer for visitors to see during tours.
However, this is not the only predecessor portrait Trump has replaced.
This month, Trump also reportedly removed portraits of Obama and former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush from the White House entryway.
Their portraits were reportedly moved to the top of the Grand Staircase, out of view from the thousands of visitors who pass through the White House.
A portrait of Biden has not been completed.
Trump sets his sights on redesigning the Kennedy Center
After taking over control of the Kennedy Center, naming himself chairman of the institution’s board, and installing former administration official Richard Grenell as its president, Trump is working to redesign how the institution looks — thanks to Congress.
“With the help of Congress, we secured the critical funding necessary to rebuild the building,” Trump told reporters during a visit to the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, during which he announced the 2025 honorees.
“We’re going to get all brand new, highest level seats, magnificent seats, and going to be all new,” Trump continued. “We could have taken the existing ones and do the little pink job, little fabric, but it’s not the same thing. So we’ll be taking out, next season, all of the seats will be taken out. The room is being completely rebuilt.”
Trump said $257 million will go toward Kennedy Center renovations and thanked Republicans for approving the funding.
“I don’t think we had too many Democrat votes. Probably you never have,” he said.
Trump sends federal forces to clean up Washington, DC
Trump’s takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force saw 800 National Guard members ready to patrol the streets of the capital over the next 30 days, after Trump federalized the district’s Metropolitan Police Department.
“Washington, D.C. should be one of the safest, cleanest, and most beautiful cities anywhere in the world, and we’re going to make it that. We’re going to make it safe,” Trump said during a Monday morning press conference.
“But not only are we stopping the crime, we’re going to clean up the trash and the graffiti and the grime and the dirt and the broken marble panels and all of the things they’ve done to hurt this city,” Trump later said. “And we’re going to restore the city back to the gleaming capital that everybody wants it to be.”
Trump said that his urge to clean up the city came from his father’s influence for spotless real estate.
“My father always used to tell me, I had a wonderful father, very smart,” Trump reminisced. “And he used to say: ‘son, when you walk into a restaurant and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.’ Same thing with the Capitol. If our Capitol is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us.”
Trump eyes building in Gaza and expanding US land
Beyond Washington, D.C., Trump has signaled his desire to use his real estate chops to expand U.S. territory and influence.
In February, Trump floated relocating the nearly 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip to Jordan and Egypt, a move that would allow the U.S. to move in and develop a high-end Mediterranean resort.
“I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential and the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. And I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world, will be there,” Trump said at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” Trump said. “And I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the ‘Riviera of the Middle East,’ this could be something that could be so magnificent.”
Trump’s comments sparked outrage and panic from the Arab world, which is not in favor of the displacement of Palestinians.
Trump also traveled to Alaska to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and discuss a possible ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Russia currently controls roughly 20% of Ukraine’s territory and is hoping for control of Ukraine’s eastern region, including Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson. Trump has raised the possibility of “land swapping,” which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with support from the European Union, has denounced.
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Trump also began his second administration by pressuring Canada to become the 51st state of the U.S. and expressing his interest in purchasing or annexing Greenland from Denmark.
“We need Greenland for national security and international security,” Trump said in March. “So we’ll, I think, we’ll go as far as we have to go.”
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