From Anchorage Daily News:
Opinion: Trump is turning the White House into a golden goose
When Donald Trump was demolishing the Bonwit Teller building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1980 to make way for Trump Tower, the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached him with a small request. It asked the young developer to preserve a pair of historic limestone friezes adorning Bonwit’s façade.
Trump agreed to look after the friezes and donate them to the museum. But he later ordered them “smashed by jackhammers” after deciding they were too expensive to preserve and “without artistic merit,” as the New York Times reported at the time. (Undocumented Polish immigrants handled the demolition.)
The Met couldn’t have anticipated that Trump’s taste, as it turned out, was decidedly and irretrievably gilded. His baroque triplex in Trump Tower wound up festooned in gold leaf and featured gold linoleum on the kitchen floor. One of his hotel ballrooms offered gold Mylar tablecloths. Another hotel was sheathed in gold-tinted glass. His name was painted in gold on his jet and memorialized in pharaonic gold letters on other properties. Mar-a-Lago and his casinos were bathed in gold. An airline he ran into the ground had gold-plated bathroom fixtures. His Las Vegas hotel looked like a giant stack of gold. He wrote a book titled “Midas Touch” and hosted a game show called “Gold Rush.” He mused about backing the U.S. dollar with gold reserves. His favorite Bond villain was Goldfinger.
So museum-quality limestone friezes? Nah. And, 45 years later, the East Wing of the White House? Nah.
The president initially said he would respect the East Wing’s architectural integrity when he contemplated an apparently DOGE-proof $200 million addition. The entire structure is now gone and will eventually be replaced by a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom appointed, of course, in gold.
Trump is seeking private funding for his ballroom, and that allows for the possibility of private influence-peddling as well. There’s also a thick catalog of other examples of a monetized presidency, all of it in plain sight.
[Related news coverage: With the East Wing gone, questions now turn to Trump’s ballroom donors]
The president is asking the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as restitution for federal investigations into his 2016 presidential campaign’s links to Russia and his later mishandling of classified documents. He oversees the agency now, and it is run by his appointees, some of whom were his personal lawyers. They’ll collectively get to decide whether Trump gets the loot.
Trump’s two eldest sons run a family business and other enterprises that profit lavishly off their proximity to the Oval Office. Trump accepted a $400 million jet from the Qatari government that is now with the Air Force but is destined for his presidential library. That single gift was worth more than all other gifts given to every one of Trump’s presidential predecessors combined. Around the same time, the Trump Organization signed a deal to operate a luxury golf resort in Qatar.
Trump has also put the regulatory and financial authority of the federal government behind cryptocurrencies, with the ballast from his own crypto holdings helping his personal fortune grow by billions of dollars during the first year of his latest term. Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder imprisoned for allowing the exchange to help others, including Hamas’ military wing, launder money or dodge sanctions, aided the Trumps’ launch of a lucrative stablecoin. Trump pardoned Zhao on Thursday.
The president has also extended his financial reach into Congress’ constitutional control of the federal purse, personalizing how the federal budget is spent, how the military gets paid and how tariffs are imposed. Republicans have stood idly by while their prerogatives erode.
Trump continues decorating the Oval Office apace. The curtains are gold. Picture frames are gold. There’s a gold trophy. There are gold coasters. Doors are trimmed in gold. Some of the furniture is upholstered in gold. There’s a gold cherub. An assortment of gold curiosities sit atop a fireplace mantel, and gold appliques of uncertain provenance are plastered everywhere else.
“Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty,” Trump advised in a recent post to his social media site. “Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!!”
Trump’s penchant for gold was merely cartoonish during his real estate and casino days. Now he’s turning the White House into his own golden goose. Amid a government shutdown, ballooning federal debt, economic uncertainty, the gutting of benefits for average Americans, the militarization of city streets and an assault on civil rights, courts, and democracy, it’s a grift that doesn’t glitter.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
The Anchorage Daily News publishes and welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.
No comments:
Post a Comment