The White House is getting a luxury makeover — new columns, gold trim, a $600 million ballroom — and you're picking up the tab while you can't afford to fix your own place.
President Trump has overseen a sweeping renovation of the people's house since returning to office, and the scope keeps growing. The latest: scaffolding now covers the North Portico's 195-year-old columns for what the White House calls "standard restoration work" and "stone repairs." But standard maintenance may not be the end of it. The Washington Post reported in March that Trump wants to replace the columns entirely with more ornate Corinthian-style ones — what the chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., called "the highest order" of classical architecture. "Why the White House didn't originally use them... is beyond me," Cook told the Post.
The column project is a small line item compared to what else is underway. The East Wing has been demolished to make way for a new ballroom now projected to cost $600 million, according to USA TODAY. Eighty-eight-foot flag poles have gone up on the grounds. Gold accents have been applied throughout the Oval Office — and a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describes Trump being found in the Oval Office personally trying to glue gold appliques onto the fireplace.
That detail, reported in The Guardian's coverage of the book Regime Change, paints a picture of a president obsessed with the aesthetics of his surroundings. The book also describes "documents hoarded in chaotic, garbage-strewn quarters" and sleep-ins after late nights on social media — a portrait at odds with the grandeur of the renovations.
USA TODAY framed the renovations straightforwardly, noting the historical provenance of the columns and quoting the White House's official statement. The Guardian buried the remodeling detail deep in a profile focused on Trump's health secrecy and the difficulty of extracting information from the administration. Neither outlet pressed the cost question: who pays, and what does it say about priorities?
The timing lands hard. Inflation has cooled from its peak but remains stubborn on groceries and insurance. Housing costs have locked a generation out of homeownership. The average American family postpones roof repairs and kitchen updates while the political class builds ballrooms.
There's also the matter of the UFC Freedom 250 fight structure that just towered over the White House — social media users compared it to something out of the movie Idiocracy — now being dismantled at who-knows-what cost.
No White House has been shy about spending on itself, regardless of party. But a $600 million ballroom and a president hand-gluing gold onto the fireplace raises a question that won't go away: whose house is this, anyway?
