Trump keeps wandering off the job to give tours of his White House remodel: report

Donald Trump’s obsession with remaking the White House into something more like his Mar-a-Lago resort is interfering with his presidential duties, as he sets aside time spent running the government to give dignitaries and visitors tours of his handiwork, according to new reporting.

According to a report from Marc Caputo of Axios, the president has had dioramas built representing all the changes he makes and likes to play with them during his meals, with one insider remarking, “This is all the president's baby. It's the Trump White House."

The report notes the president has “spent as many as 20 hours on some projects, aides say, engaging in impromptu design sessions between negotiating peace deals and talks over the government shutdown,” adding that, “After strong-arming Benjamin Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire two weeks ago, Trump led the Israeli prime minister on a 40-minute tour of White House renovations. Last week, Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb got the same treatment.”

“Last month, a delegation of Florida House lawmakers spent even more time with the president — well over an hour — as he showed them the new tile floors in the old washroom of the Lincoln Bedroom (statuary marble Trump had selected),” Caputo wrote before noting that one member of the group explained that the president engaged them in voting of which tile should be used, which a White House insider confirmed by explaining, “He asks everyone for a vote on everything. We vote. Anybody that walks through gets a vote. He cares so deeply about perfection that this is what he does."

During a recent meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Trump walked the entourage outside to show off his new sound system in what he is now calling the "Rose Garden Club," and boasted, “We have a great speaker system.”

As for Trump’s noodling around with the 3D models, while the government is shut down, one insider admitted, “The tenser things are, the more he moves the [diorama] pieces around in his spare time, or he takes a break and thinks about the marble he wants or the columns, whether they're going to be Corinthian or not.”

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