One of Donald Trump’s former White House lawyers gave a vivid description of what the president is doing to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: turning it into part “Las Vegas,” part “w---ehouse.”
Ty Cobb, who worked in the Trump administration from July 2017 to May 2018, lamented the president’s various architectural and decor changes, which include demolishing the East Wing for the construction of a ballroom, which the Supreme Court on Monday allowed to continue.
On CNN, anchor Erin Burnett read some of Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissent: “‘The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture.’”
“That is, in a sense, a non-legal statement, right? That is a statement that’s somehow more profound than that,” she asked Cobb.
“Yeah, very much so. I mean, it certainly touched me because, as somebody who had spent a lot of time in the White House and in or about the grounds... It was a beautiful setting and a historic setting,” Cobb, 76, said. “It’s turning into, you know, some combination of a w---ehouse and Las Vegas at this stage of the game with all the gold and paving of it. So, it’s tragic what’s going on. But sadly, it’s going to continue, at least for the time being.”
Trump, 80, has taken a much greater interest in the White House in his second term. The ballroom, former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged last October, was his “main priority.”
Meanwhile, Trump has paved over the lawn of the Rose Garden to make a patio reminiscent of Mar-a-Lago, demolished the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, and is in the process of making the South Lawn flush with his new helipad, which first means ripping it up.
The Oval Office also has much more gold this time around. “It’s the Golden Office for the Golden Age,” Leavitt said last April. Trump has been known to even affix some gold adornments himself with super glue.
Additionally, the president added a gold label to the exterior of the Oval Office, and created a gold-framed Presidential Walk of Fame in the West Wing.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Cobb’s remarks.
The president’s utilization of gold, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in Regime Change, stems from his first marriage to Ivana Trump, the vice president of interior design at the Trump Organization.
“Trump’s first wife, Ivana, the vice president of interior design at his company, had had a penchant for gilding everything,” Haberman and Swan write. “It was Ivana who was said to have first encouraged the gold obsession that soon became a hallmark of her husband’s properties.”
It is now the butt of jokes. All the gold in the White House was fodder for former President Barack Obama in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, the HBO Max show made by his and wife Michelle’s Higher Ground Productions.
