The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman claims President Donald Trump is consumed by an obsession with renovations and monuments to himself.
It’s no secret that the 80-year-old president has spent much of his second term putting his stamp on everything from the White House to the Kennedy Center, but the co-author of the bestselling book Regime Change says the fixation runs far deeper than the public realizes—so much so that it appears to occupy an outsized share of his attention.
“If you looked at a chart of his mind share, this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations,” Haberman said during an appearance on The Ezra Klein Show podcast, released Friday.
The White House correspondent illustrated her point with an anecdote from March, when she and fellow Times reporter Jonathan Swan sat down with Trump in the Oval Office for a fact-check interview for their book. Haberman said the president spent much of the conversation focused on his renovation plans, even as the war in Iran he had launched was unfolding.
“It’s Day 17 of the war, and he’s telling us: Here’s my models of the ballroom—and so forth. It was like he didn’t have a care in the world,” she said.
When Klein asked whether any policy issues occupied Trump’s attention in the same way as his renovations, Haberman’s answer was blunt: no.
Since returning to office, Trump has initiated more White House renovation projects than can be tracked on two hands.
A White House spokesperson defended the work, saying the president is carrying out “long-overdue and necessary renovations” to beautify the “People’s House” for the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence.
“Thanks to the Builder-in-Chief, the White House will be properly glorified and remain in excellent condition for generations to come,” the spokesperson added.
The primary focus of his real estate overhaul is a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom currently being constructed on the demolished site of the historic East Wing, which has grown in both physical scale and overall cost as construction progresses.
The Rose Garden was another victim of the president’s renovations and was stripped of its traditional lawn layout in favor of a paved outdoor patio, while the Lincoln Bedroom bathroom underwent a gut renovation that Trump publicly insisted was designed to match the stylistic period of the Lincoln era, unlike the old design, which he deemed “totally inappropriate.”
Trump’s design ambitions have stretched beyond the White House walls. He oversaw a $16 million project to paint the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool an “American Flag Blue,” an effort that derailed when rapid algae growth turned the basin murky green, and the newly applied paint began peeling.
The president’s broader ambitions for Washington, D.C., include a proposed 250-foot arch modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe—already dubbed the “Arc de Trump”—with an estimated $100 million price tag, as well as a newly unveiled $22 billion proposal to overhaul Washington Dulles International Airport.
Together, the projects—which continue to multiply, with the president unveiling the “Arts of War” and “Arts of Peace” statues this week, a pair of giant horse-and-rider sculptures coated in 24-karat gold—represent Trump’s latest efforts to reshape the nation’s landscape with his own personal imprint.
“It’s a legacy thing, but I always think of legacy with him as different than the way we usually use the word ‘legacy,’” Haberman told Klein.
She said Trump’s driving question is not “What am I leaving behind for the world?” but instead “What am I leaving behind so the world can’t kick me off the world,” which is, Haberman suggested, a quest to create monuments and a legacy that cannot be undone.
Yet, Trump’s push to cement his name into history has already hit a roadblock. A judge ruled last month that his attempt to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to include his name was illegal, leaving the president to watch his branding removed from the building.
“The degree of mind share on these projects is vast,” Haberman repeated during the interview, arguing that Trump is “vastly less interested in and reactive to domestic politics this time” as Republicans brace for a difficult November midterm election cycle.
