Hillary Clinton has redecorated part of the White House before, which is partly why her take on Trump’s renovation carries some weight.
She raised the subject in an interview posted Friday on Kara Swisher’s “Pivot” podcast, comparing the gold detailing Trump has spread across the Oval Office and West Wing to Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq. “It’s sad to me — it’s sad that it’s so tackied up, and it’s a reflection of, you know, his narcissistic personality and his need to feel important, including sticking gold embellishments all over the walls of the Oval Office,” she said.
She wasn’t done there.
“This is a man who, his mind apparently goes to, ‘Where can I add more gold?’ instead of, ‘How do I get out of Iran without looking like the loser that I am?'” she added, tying the aesthetic critique directly to the ongoing war.
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The gold is only one piece of a much larger footprint.
Trump unveiled a “Presidential Walk of Fame” along the Rose Garden colonnade last December, lined with plaques taking partisan jabs at his predecessors, jabs Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed he wrote himself.
The ballroom project carries a reported $250 million price tag, funded through corporate donors including Google, which pledged $22 million as part of settling a lawsuit with Trump over his YouTube suspension after January 6. Construction crews tore down the East Wing to make room for it.
Separately, Trump has pushed forward a 246-foot triumphal arch planned for the Virginia side of the Potomac, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe he admired in Paris. That unfinished ballroom is what actually worried Clinton most.
“The next president is going to have a big decision. What do you do with a half-finished ballroom?” she asked, calling it a “carbuncle on the side of the White House.” Pushed for an actual answer, she came up short. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
She’d raised the alarm on the demolition itself when it first began last year, posting: “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
Friday’s interview closed on a lighter note, with Clinton floating her own post-Trump job title. “Wouldn’t that be a good idea? Secretary of cleaning it up, fixing up,” she said, nominating herself for the role of “Secretary of Taking Down the Gold.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle skipped the decor argument entirely and redirected to 2016. “Hillary Clinton never had the opportunity to decorate the Oval Office as president because she suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of President Trump, which she has never recovered from,” he said.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
