Trump has turned White House into his own golden goose
By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion
When Donald Trump was demolishing the Bonwit Teller building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1980 to make way for Trump Tower, the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached him with a small request. It asked the young developer to preserve a pair of historic limestone friezes adorning Bonwit’s façade.
Trump agreed to look after the friezes and donate them to the museum. But he later ordered them “smashed by jackhammers” after deciding they were too expensive to preserve and “without artistic merit,” as the New York Times reported at the time. (Undocumented Polish immigrants handled the demolition.)
The Met couldn’t have anticipated that Trump’s taste, as it turned out, was decidedly and irretrievably gilded. His baroque triplex in Trump Tower wound up festooned in gold leaf and featured gold linoleum on the kitchen floor. One of his hotel ballrooms offered gold Mylar tablecloths. Another hotel was sheathed in gold-tinted glass. His name was painted in gold on his jet and memorialized in pharaonic gold letters on other properties. Mar-a-Lago and his casinos were bathed in gold. An airline he ran into the ground had gold-plated bathroom fixtures. His Las Vegas hotel looked like a giant stack of gold. He wrote a book titled “Midas Touch” and hosted a game show called “Gold Rush.” He mused about backing the U.S. dollar with gold reserves. His favorite Bond villain was Goldfinger.
So museum-quality limestone friezes? Nah. And, 45 years later, the East Wing of the White House? Nah.
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