Since Donald Trump returned to the White House six months ago, many observers have noticed a significant change in decor there, especially in the Oval Office. There seems to be a lot more gold, with the seat of government beginning to look a lot more like Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and the president’s other residences.
According to a Wall Street Journal story in April, Trump enlisted his “gold guy” to redecorate the White House. And it even extended to his portraits.
“The White House asked that Trump’s portrait, along with Vice President JD Vance’s, be printed with a golden border that would catch the light, an administration official said. The reprint required metallic gold ink and a specialized printer. And it delayed the completion of the portraits, some of which had already been printed with a more understated white border, according to an internal government document outlining the request,” the Journal said at the time.
Also, there have recently been some viral photos of the “before and after” of how the Oval Office has looked, both in the Biden era and more recently:
The Oval Office: How It Used to Look Compared to Now.
Everything is gold lmao pic.twitter.com/seic4NP4xg
— Volodymyr Tretyak 🇺🇦 (@VolodyaTretyak) July 17, 2025
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According to HuffPost, gold accents, subtle and not so subtle, have been added all over the place, including “gold crown molding,” a fireplace “cluttered with gold statues,” gold coasters, and “a TON of these gold squiggly things all over the place.”
This picture from the White House really shows how many gold accents have been added to the Oval Office. This is how it looked last year: https://t.co/Y2auT8fjTg pic.twitter.com/GCXoyunFjf
— Michelle L. Price (@michellelprice) April 7, 2025
According to a USA Today story this week, Trump has declared that he picked out all of the golden decor himself.
“I picked it all myself,” Trump said, per the story. “I’m very proud of it.”
You can take the man out of the real estate industry, but you can’t take the real estate industry out of the man.
Love this story by @SwapnaVenugopal.
https://t.co/nfCcg0J8zy— Erin Mansfield (@_erinmansfield) July 21, 2025
“It keeps my real estate juices flowing,” Trump told a reporter earlier this year, per USA Today.
“He used the word ‘class’ a lot, and it was a high-class thing for him,” Barbara Res, a former vice president at Trump Organization who oversaw construction, told USA Today. “It conveyed an illusion of taste and wealth, and that’s why he wanted to gild everything.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
