Is there nothing that President Donald Trump won’t wreck?
While he’s clearly out to wreck the United States writ large, he is also carrying out ceaseless aesthetic attacks on the White House and just about everywhere else in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s latest remodel idea displays his usual reverence for history. He’s kicking around the idea of getting rid of the White House Treaty Room and replacing it with another guest bedroom, including an en suite bath, natch.
Trump’s disdain for the People’s House is always terrible, but this proposal is especially off-putting because it’s just so low-rent. Are the White House’s 16 existing guest rooms and 35 bathrooms not enough? Are there members of the Trump family so hard up that they need yet another spare room to crash in? Is Trump running a flophouse?
In February, Trump invited some of his pet appointees from the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the Commission of Fine Arts to hear his vision for the Treaty Room, according to The New York Times. Mid-tour, Trump “encouraged,” as one Times source put it, the attendees to vote on the spot to approve his changes. Some other sources claim it was a joke, but it doesn’t seem much like a joke when the president of the United States demands a literal show of hands over support for his latest pet project.
The Treaty Room is a genuinely historic part of the White House. Former President John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty there in 1963. The room was also used to sign the peace deal that ended the Spanish-American War, in 1898. The Treaty Table dates back to former President Ulysses S. Grant. And multiple presidents have used it as their study.
The room is about as reflective of the sweep of American history as you can get.
But hey, Trump wants a 17th guest room, with an en suite bath. And a builder’s gotta build, right?
“President Trump is the builder-in-chief with an extraordinary eye for detail and design, and his bold vision will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and be felt by generations to come,” Davis Ingle, White House spokesperson, told the Times. “His successes will continue to give the White House the glory it deserves.”
Okay, so the Treaty Room, which commemorates many real historic events, does not have the glory the White House deserves, but another bedroom suite somehow does?
Watching someone deface the White House like Trump is doing would be terrible in any situation, but it’s made all the worse by the fact that Trump’s taste is awful. He favors gold paint everywhere, applied to decorations that he no doubt thinks look fancy but really are just Temu-level wall decorations.
Sadly, the chances that anyone will stop Trump from destroying another part of American history are pretty much zero. He already remodeled the Lincoln Bathroom, slathering it with marble and gold and an ugly chandelier, hearkening back to his Mar-a-Lago bathroom/illegal classified document storage area.
He also destroyed the White House’s East Wing. He’s trying to gut the Kennedy Center. He paved over the Rose Garden. He’s scattering racist statues hither and yon.
Trump may tell himself and those around him that he is a builder, but he’s actually a wrecker. He knows how to destroy things, to impose his terrible aesthetics on the world, but he has no sense of preservation and no sense of history.
His thirst for covering everything in material so ostentatious that it manages to look cheap simply cannot be slaked, and he’s playing with house money, so there’s no reason for him to stop.
Lisa Needham March 26, 2026 at 11:30PM From Daily Kos
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