When it comes to altering the White House, it’s been a busy year for Donald Trump. The incumbent president decided, for example, to pave the Rose Garden. He has taken a borderline unhealthy interest in interior decorating, including bringing in his “gold guy” to add gold finishes to just about everything in the Oval Office.
Trump also installed a flagpole that he seemed awfully excited about, he boasted about “ripping” apart the tile in the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom, he installed a mirror and bronze lettering at the entrance to the West Wing, and he turned the Oval Office study into a depot for “TRUMP 2028” merch, as if it were a cheap gift shop at a Trump-owned property.
Then his ambitions took a more destructive turn: The president tore down the entirety of the East Wing, despite having promised not to do so, to make room for a vanity project, a giant ballroom.
But to fully appreciate just how ridiculous the overhaul has become, consider what Trump has done to the colonnade at the White House exterior on the south side of the mansion.
In September, the Republican installed what was billed as a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” featuring images of American presidents. Predictably, the gaudy display was turned into an exercise in juvenile political trolling: Where there was supposed to be an image of Joe Biden, there’s a framed photograph of an autopen.
This week it got worse. NBC News reported:
The White House has installed plaques on the exterior of the building bashing President Donald Trump’s predecessors, including Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and promoting disinformation about their administrations.
The plaques were hung up below presidential portraits that have been on display on Trump’s recently added ‘Presidential Walk of Fame’ in the White House colonnade.
A related Washington Post report noted that the plaques “have all the feel of an official marker placed at a historical site, with bronze-hued trim and gold-lettered type.” But the words on the plaques “are written in the style of a Truth Social post.”
That’s not a compliment. The displays smear assorted Democrats in ways that are cheap and dishonest, while praising others based on their associations with the incumbent. (The one for Ronald Reagan reads in part, “He was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”)
While this display was already a tacky embarrassment, a New York magazine report made the case that it’s now “even more stunningly stupid.”
The conversation about Trump’s White House renovations is important, but it’s worth expanding the conversation to include what can be described as Trump’s White House vandalism. To add insult to injury, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News in a statement that Trump wrote the text of “many” of the plaques. “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind,” she said. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the president himself.” For now, let’s not get sidetracked by a debate about their eloquence. Let’s also skip past Leavitt’s dangling participle and the hilarious suggestion that Trump is “a student of history.” Let’s note that the sitting American president, at a time when he ought to be quite busy with weighty responsibilities of international import, is investing time and energy into writing trolling messages for fake plaques. This White House is obsessed with trivialities and distractions. By all appearances, the fixation is getting worse.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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