When it comes to the details of governing, Donald Trump continues to struggle with the basics, flubbing easy questions about his own day-to-day decisions and offering fresh evidence that the post-policy president still hasn’t taken much of an interest in policymaking.
But when it comes to interior decorating, Trump apparently has quite a bit to say. As The Washington Post summarized:
After talking about tragedy in Texas, about war in Ukraine and Gaza, about bombs on Iran and about global tariffs, President Donald Trump revealed perhaps his biggest passion: the aesthetic changes he has made to the White House. He is, in many ways, the world’s most powerful interior designer.
As the Republican’s second term got underway, he and his team took a surprising interest in interior design, specifically targeting portraits and murals of former officials the president doesn’t like. This dovetailed with Trump taking great pride in putting a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall in the Oval Office.
But the president’s latest White House Cabinet meeting took the story in a weird direction. After the president suggested there simply wasn’t time to waste discussing the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein report, released a day earlier, the Post reported, “Trump spent 15 more going through, in significant detail, the new paintings he had ordered hung on the walls. He looked overhead at the light fixtures. And he asked his Cabinet members for a show of hands on whether they like gold leafing for the ceiling molding.”
This included an extended riff on the color of the room he and his team were in at the time and a lengthy story of how he obtained a clock that used to be in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office.
Trump: We painted the room a nice color. Beige color. The only question is, will I gold leaf the corners? My cabinet can take a vote
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-07-08T17:50:39.105Z
This comes on the heels of a series of related reports, including news that there’s a picture of Trump alongside first lady portraits in the White House, and a separate report about replacing a portrait of Barack Obama with a painting related to the assassination attempt that targeted Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.








