Most people decorate their offices with family photos, diplomas, or the occasional motivational quote. Kelly Loeffler, Trump’s head of the Small Business Administration, apparently preferred a more personal touch.
When she posted a TikTok video on Thursday walking through the SBA building and answering staff questions, the hallway behind her was lined with gold-framed portraits of herself, one after another, covering the walls of a federal agency she has run for less than two years.
The camera caught every single one as she walked: Loeffler with National Guard troops, Loeffler with Republican lawmakers in baseball uniforms, Loeffler alongside Trump at the unveiling of his 2024 TIME Person of the Year cover, all of them in gold frames and arranged with a precision that suggested considerable thought had gone into the placement.
A simple FAQ video had somehow turned into a tour of a very personal art collection.
@sbagovAnswering FAQs with Administrator Loeffler♬ Ivory – Luke Luxe
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Two details made the whole thing harder to look away from.
Loeffler appeared throughout the clip carrying a navy-blue binder that, on closer inspection, contained no papers whatsoever. “Your binder is empty,” one viewer wrote, a comment that gathered more attention than anything she actually said.
She also appeared to struggle at points with the basic coordination of walking and talking at the same time, which commenters described as “unsettling” with a frequency that suggested they were not being dramatic.
That hallway, as it turns out, was not an outlier in this administration. Federal spaces have been redecorated with a confidence that historians have struggled to keep pace with.
The White House exterior now features a Walk of Fame displaying portraits of past presidents, with placards that historians say contain partisan framing and factual inaccuracies. Joe Biden’s portrait does not show Biden at all, but rather the autopen device Trump and his allies claim invalidated much of the previous administration’s legislative record.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi took a more personal approach on her first day at the DOJ. She allegedly walked into an office building, found portraits of Biden and Kamala Harris still on the walls, and told staff: “Don’t you people realize who won the election?” The portraits came down.
Loeffler’s gallery makes more sense viewed through that lens.
The administration launched TikTok accounts across several agencies last month, reversing years of the platform being off-limits for government employees over national security concerns. The SBA video was part of that push, an attempt at the influencer-style content that has become a signature of how this White House communicates. Loeffler’s account bio reads “Making Main Street Great Again,” which sets the tone clearly enough.
Featured image via Tiktok screengrab
