Donald Trump has adopted an odd habit of putting Oval Office meetings on hold to make or take phone calls.
According to NBC News, as part of a larger story about life inside the White House during Trump’s second term, Trump calls the Oval Office “Grand Central Terminal,” due to all the comings and goings there.
Trump, the report said, will “interrupt an Oval Office meeting and spontaneously pick up the phone and call a friend or confidant,” a senior administration official told NBC. Among those whom he calls are Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch and UFC boss Dana White.
“He’ll say: ‘Let’s call Rupert. Fox is killing me today,’” the report says.
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The undisciplined atmosphere has led to such strange moments as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wandering into a military meeting, after which he was told to wait outside due to worries over whether he had the proper security clearance. Also, a lot of cabinet secretaries and other officials will mill about the White House.
Fox News, MAGA hats and cookies: Inside Trump’s West Wing https://t.co/QQxx6Hw2NG
— Gabe Gutierrez (@gabegutierrez) July 2, 2025
“No one wants to miss the decision,” one official said of why that is.
Another detail in the story is that Vice President JD Vance is often spotted “standing outside the Oval Office near the Keurig coffee maker, drinking a cup or eating one of the cookies on offer.”
Trump also, the story said, refers to a certain area off the Oval Office as “the Monica Lewinsky Room,” as it was the place where Bill Clinton’s dalliances with the White House intern in the 1990s, and uses that room to store MAGA hats and other memorabilia. Kid Rock told a similar story about a White House visit in 2024, about Trump using the same term:
This is the Monica Lewinsky room 🤣 pic.twitter.com/owsvHN7hxa
— Gabriela Iglesias🇺🇲 (@iglesias_gabby) September 23, 2024
One White House official also told NBC that cabinet secretaries are around the White House a surprising amount of the time, as opposed to at their own agencies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in particular, is described as “a perennial guest: quick to arrive, not as quick to leave.”
“They should be running their bureaucracies. They shouldn’t be hanging around the White House,” that person said in the story. NBC did note, however, that the cabinet has remained intact so far in this Trump term, whereas secretaries were constantly getting fired and otherwise leaving during the president’s first term.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
