‘What else needs to be improved?’: Inside Trump’s relentless quest to leave his mark on Washington

First there was a little bit of gold in the Oval Office. And then a little more. And then more after that, gilding the ceiling, framing mirrors and portraits and filling in what little space was left on curving gallery walls packed with presidential portraiture.

There is now 24-karat gilded ornamentation in the Cabinet Room, two massive flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, a paved patio over what had long been the Rose Garden’s grass lawn and plans to break ground this fall on a massive new $200 million ballroom that will completely alter the scale of the White House’s East Wing.

And roughly a month ago, Donald Trump demanded that better lighting be installed around the ceiling of the Cabinet Room, an upgrade that has not been previously reported. The president’s convenings of his Cabinet — with everyone around the table offering policy updates and effusive praise — are conducted with the press in the room and largely for public consumption. But Trump, who spent more than a decade conducting the business of his reality show “The Apprentice” from a made-for-TV boardroom inside his eponymous Manhattan tower, wasn’t happy with the footage from a meeting and had brighter lights installed, according to a White House official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

And it’s just the start.

In a second term defined by the scope of Trump’s unrestrained ambition, America’s first property developer-turned-president is at times approaching the job like a modern day Howard Roark or Baron Haussmann, determined to leave his distinctive mark on the physical spaces that define the presidency and the nation’s capital. And according to two people familiar with the president’s plans, he’s envisioning projects beyond the White House, including refurbishing and rebranding a golf course in the middle of the Potomac River.

“He seems to wake up and say, what else needs to be improved?” said one of the people familiar with the president’s plans who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “Every day, it’s something new.”

At times, the president has seemed as engaged in reprising the role of property manager he played for decades as he is in the more consequential matters of governing — stepping out of the Oval Office to chat with the contractors installing the Rose Garden’s new patio deck, inspecting the West Wing roof, and going on at length about his plans to beautify Washington during freewheeling press scrums.

“I love construction,” the president said in June while overseeing the installation of the new flagpoles, informing reporters that they were being set nine feet deep for stability. “I know it better than anybody.”

The president this week offered a timeline, suggesting Washington would be “beautified in 12 months.”

According to the two people familiar, Trump wants the improvements done in time for next summer’s celebration of the country’s 250th birthday and is “very focused” on getting the city’s fountains, from Lafayette Square just outside the White House north gate to Union Station’s Columbus fountain and other water features along the National Mall, operational again.

“He cares a lot about the fountains,” the person said.

Several of the city’s grander water features, the centerpieces of parks or memorials, have not been operational in years, a function of the National Park Service’s deferred maintenance backlog and a lack of funding.

“President Trump is a builder at heart and has brought this talent to our nation’s capital,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle. “He is restoring American greatness to everything he touches — from the White House to our federal buildings and DC parks — and is fulfilling his promise to usher in a new Golden Age of America.”

Last Monday, during an appearance in the Oval Office where he spoke for more than an hour, Trump deviated frequently from the event’s primary focus — his deployment of federal troops to police Washington — to detail a plan to use $2 billion of federal funds yet to be approved by Congress to spruce up the capital.

“We’re doing it with Clark Construction,” he said, outlining a plan to focus on the area within a three-mile radius of the White House. “It’s going to be beautiful, all those lightbulbs. You see the poles, they’re rusting and they’ve got different lenses on top.”

Trump also brought up plans to repave the city’s streets, implying that he would be doing the contracting himself. “We’re going to take off the asphalt and put beautiful, well-done asphalt,” he said on Monday. “You know, if you have a good asphalt worker, it’s the most beautiful thing you could have.”

The president, after taking control of the Kennedy Center’s board earlier this year, has launched a major renovation of the cultural venue, vowing to install new marble floors and cover over the I-beams that surround the building’s exterior.

“I think the I-beams should be covered with some incredible stone — probably marble, but marble’s a bad outdoor stone, but looks better than granite,” Trump said during a March visit to the site. “But it should be covered. And we’ll do that.”

He made an unscheduled visit there earlier this month to inspect materials and announced that the 2026 World Cup draw would take place at the venue.

And further down the banks of the Potomac River, Trump is setting his sights on the East Potomac Golf Links at Hains Point. According to the second person familiar with private conversations, the president has warmed to an idea, first presented to him by a staffer, of refurbishing and rebranding the public course sitting on the narrow strip of land in the river between National Airport and the Wharf. He even autographed a rendering of a new golden logo, nearly identical to those for the president’s other clubs, for what could be called “Washington National Golf Course.”

A White House official noted that Trump described his plans to improve Washington during his 2024 campaign. But a number of the changes he’s made to the White House have been spontaneous, building on one another.

On Friday, Trump gave an impromptu tour of the Oval to a group of visitors, showing off various design details, and blasted some of his favorite songs from the new Rose Garden speakers for several hours. He also shared his ideas for future improvements, including a desire to paint the hulking grey Eisenhower Executive Office Building just west of the White House a matching shade of white, according to one of the people familiar.

“Everything he’s done or plans to do, there’s a good reason for it,” the White House official said, noting that Trump has not used taxpayer dollars for any of it.

Replacing the Rose Garden lawn, which was often mushy or muddy for events, with a paved patio has created a more user-friendly gathering space, the official said, suggesting that the president would begin holding press conferences, receptions and other events there in the coming weeks.

The new ballroom, which Trump wants finished by 2028 in time to utilize during his final year in office, will provide a larger space for events — including state dinners, which have been held in recent years in tents on the South Lawn — than the East Room.

Both projects are being funded through private donations, with Meredith O’Rourke, the finance director on Trump’s 2024 campaign, overseeing the effort.

Federal law allows presidents broad discretion to make changes to the White House, a structure that has evolved since it was first occupied by President John Adams in 1800. An attic was converted to a habitable third floor in 1927. President Harry S. Truman added the balcony to the south-facing portico in 1948, a year before moving out and into Blair House across the street while the entire residence, which had grown structurally unsound, was gutted and rebuilt.

But no president has been as focused as Trump on aesthetics.

“There have always been updates and changes to the White House. This is probably the first time when there are so many at once,” said Stewart McLaurin, the president of the White House Historical Association who gave Trump a tour of a new gift shop last week. “He’s taking the time to be involved in it. He’s actually very hands-on, and I think that comes in some measure from his background as a developer and his interest in building and construction.”

Some of the changes to the Oval Office, however, serve little purpose beyond Trump’s own predilections for gilded rooms and ornamentation.

"The gilding of the Oval seems to be about creating an imperial or royal setting for the performing of the duties of the presidency and a powerful executive branch,” said Daniel Abramson, a professor of American and European architecture at Boston University. “This is clearly a president who wants the attention and power concentrated on him.”

Barbara Res, the architect who oversaw the construction of Trump Tower in the early 1980s, likened the new gold-coated Oval Office to the president’s private residence in New York.

“He has always wanted to convey luxury, and he wants to convey — his favorite word, by the way — class,” Res said in an interview, recalling Trump’s obsession with the details of marble slabs and other finishes. “He would demand perfection about a God-made product like marble. He’d tell us not to use a piece because the veins didn’t go in the right direction.”

On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order declaring “classical and traditional” architecture the preferred government styles, reviving his first term crusade against modernist government buildings and overhauling design principles that have guided the U.S. government’s construction for more than six decades.

The order, titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” is similar to one from his first term in directing that all new federal buildings in Washington, D.C. be constructed in a “classical” Greek or Roman style, asserting that more recent “modernist and brutalist” structures were “often unpopular with Americans.”

But it goes further in undoing a policy that has been in place since the early 1960s that allowed architects greater freedom to construct federal buildings in the style of their times.

The American Institute of Architects has criticized the restrictions on architectural freedom. And some cultural critics have suggested that Trump’s imposition of his own style on symbolic government buildings reflects a desire to exert sweeping control over American life.

The White House official insisted that Trump’s motivations are purer: “He’s actually thinking about his legacy. He wants to leave a lasting impact and leave things better off than they were.”