President Donald Trump has been on a mad dash to slap gold all over the nation's capital to reflect his personal preferences, and an essayist unpacked the meaning behind that obsession.
The soon-to-be-80-year-old president has long been synonymous with a certain type of gaudy luxury, and he's festooned gold touches throughout the White House and made other aesthetic chances in Washington, D.C., to satisfy his "craving for kingliness," wrote Slate's Christina Cauterucci.
"Though Trump is a man of specific tastes, his aesthetic thrust is neither complicated nor refined," Cauterucci wrote. "A maximalist to the end, he likes things ornate. He likes them newly constructed but grounded in centuries-old design. And above all else, he likes them gold."
Gold has been his trademark since the 1980s, and he began his political career with a famous ride down a gold-mirrored escalator and has reveled in a 22-foot gold-leaf statue of himself – an idol, according to Cauterucci – dedicated at one of his golf courses by a group of clergy members.
"As far as design fetishes go, gold is a logical one," she wrote. "Like many of Trump’s cultural fixations, his love of gold is painfully on the nose. He thirsts for the kind of ultimate supremacy and luxury enjoyed by monarchical figures of the past, who built the likes of Egyptian temples and Versailles, leaving lasting marks on their national landscapes. This chafes against the restraint demanded by his current role, which has historically been carried out in humbler fashion."
Trump ordered the demolition of the White House East Wing without congressional input to make way for a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot gold ballroom, and Cauterucci turned to ancient cautionary tales to explain the root of his obsession and its ultimate futility.
"Gold is garish, obvious, a rejection of respectability — the decor equivalent of Mar-a-Lago face,' she wrote. An overreliance on precious metals in the flaunting of one’s wealth can give the impression of protesting too much. It reveals not just an absence of original taste but deep insecurity. Trump is soothed by his gold surroundings, which remind him that his assets will protect him from the worst this cruel world has to offer."
"And when his time on Earth draws to a close?" Cauterucci added. "Even mortality can be staved off by enough gold, Trump seems to believe."
Trump is the oldest president ever sworn into office, and he's clearly declining in health and mental acuity, and Cauterucci interpreted his rush to plaster his name on buildings and treat the capital city as his personal property as a reflection of his fear of mortality.
"Long after Trump is gone, Americans will look on his works — the gilded White House ballroom that will be considered, if not named, the Trump Room — and despair," Cauterucci wrote.
"But like Ozymandias, and like all the monarchs whose reigns and empires ultimately ended, Trump cannot buy his way out of death, nor can he take his riches with him when he goes," she added. "Human civilizations across the ages have understood this to be an important lesson, which is how gold became the go-to cautionary symbol for greed, vanity, and the hollow existence to which they lead. From King Midas to Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” from Goldfinger and Smaug to the crab obsessed with all things 'shiny' in Moana, gold has provided the simplest illustration of how wealth can distract a fool from what really matters, often at his own eventual expense."