Donald Trump’s press team posted a glowing video review of his latest D.C. revamp that conveniently left out all the other comments slamming it as a tacky waste of money.
Rapid Response 47, one of the White House’s official press accounts on X, posted the clip on Friday morning. It features Amy and Gio, who are visiting the capital from Topeka, Kansas, talking about the 80-year-old president’s gilded do-over of the Arts of War and Arts of Peace statues during a rickshaw tour near the Lincoln Memorial.
“I was walking on the back side of the memorial, and I was just like, woah, what is that?!” Amy says in the clip. “I didn’t see them before, but they look very bright,” she added, without clarifying whether that’s actually a good thing. Amy, for her part, seemed to think it is, saying they “look really nice” and that they’re “super shiny” and “beautiful.”
Turns out those comments are quite literally the only nice thing anyone had to say in the original video, uploaded by local station WTOP News a day earlier. “I thought they looked great before,” Steven Davies, a D.C. resident, said of the do-over, calling it “a little over-the-top for my taste.”
Karen, from Maryland, went harder. “Tacky,” she said. “Looks like Home Depot gold spray paint.” Francis, also from Maryland, was of much the same mind.
“I don’t remember them being this shiny, this gaudy,” he told the outlet. “I think there’s a better use for the funds.”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House to ask why it omitted these less-than-favorable reviews from what it chose to post on X. It responded by simply resharing the shorter clip it had already posted.
It’s not entirely out of character for the second MAGA administration. Trump himself often wanders around with aide Natalie Harp, 34, whom officials have privately nicknamed the “human printer” for her habit of printing out glowing online articles and comments for presidential pick-me-ups in the midst of all the backlash his second stint in office has caused.
Trump, who sued CBS in late 2024 for what he claimed was a deceptively edited interview with Kamala Harris, has been famously outraged by selective coverage when other people do it.
The president’s gold-plated revamp of the statues, unveiled Thursday, blew past both its projected budget and its deadline. Trump had promised the 24-karat makeover would cost just $2.5 million and be ready in time for America’s 250th birthday. A no-bid contract saw it come in at double that price, almost a month after the Fourth of July.
It’s only the latest in a string of disasters trailing his efforts to remake the nation’s capital in his own image. Trump has demolished the White House East Wing to make way for what designs promise will be an achingly tasteless new ballroom. He pledged last year that project would cost just $200 million, with the bill footed entirely by private donors. The price tag has since ballooned to $600 million, with at least half of it footed by taxpayers.
Then there’s the gilded, 250-foot “triumphal arch” slated to overshadow Arlington National Cemetery, along with his $22 billion renovations at Washington Dulles International Airport, and his bid to transform the municipal golf links at East Potomac Park into a championship-grade course. His $14 million “American flag blue” refurb of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has for months succeeded only in turning its waters a sickening shade of green.
Trump’s lust for gold in particular, rivaling even that of a certain villain from the Austin Powers movie franchise, has meanwhile reached the very seat of power amid reports the president has taken to tacking gold additions onto Oval Office furnishings—with the help of a little superglue.
