Kathrine Frich
Former president Barack Obama recently criticized it.
Moving into a new place always brings out strong opinions about the decor.
Most tenants just swap out the curtains, hang a few pictures, and leave the walls alone when their lease is up.
One very famous resident, however, wants to make sure nobody ever touches his interior design again.
Locking in the gold
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation to declare the Oval Office and Cabinet Room a national monument, according to the Irish Star. The move was his first official act since Republicans suffered heavy losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Having already torn down the East Wing to build a grand ballroom and packed his workspace with gold trim, the president wants his remodel to stay put.
“It will not be allowed to be touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape,” Trump said, as quoted by the Irish Star. “We like the Oval Office, and it’s a symbol, like the White House itself.”
A stinging restaurant joke
Behind the scenes, the order follows a fiery war of words with former President Barack Obama. At an Ohio campaign stop last month, Obama mocked the endless building work and suggested his successor belonged on the home improvement network HGTV.
“There’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama joked at the rally, according to the Irish Star.
That punchline clearly hit a nerve. On Truth Social, Trump called Obama a “grossly incompetent President” and attacked Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who went on to win his Tuesday race to become the first Muslim senator. Later, at a stop in Mississippi, Trump fired back again.
“For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump told the crowd, adding that the restaurant chain is actually a “very successful company” and claiming the White House was in “horrible condition” when he arrived.
What the order really does
Thursday marked the third time in a single week that the president focused on construction, following Monday’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and Wednesday’s beam signing for his new ballroom.
Still, the Irish Star noted that the monument label will not actually stop the next president from changing the curtains or reversing the document completely.
In fact, the text states it will not “restrict the President’s authority to redecorate the monument, select furnishings, or make ordinary operational and security modifications that do not substantially impair the monument’s historic structure or architectural character.”
While it puts the Interior secretary in charge of reviewing major structural work, it leaves out Trump’s verbal claim that lawmakers must approve big changes.
“If they want to say, ‘Let’s not have oval anymore, let’s make it square,’ what happens is they have to go back to Congress and hopefully the Congress, the people in Congress, will be smart enough not to let that happen,” Trump said, according to the Irish Star.
