Recently, Jonathan Swan – one of the authors of a new tell-all about Donald Trump’s second term – told the hosts of The View that if you had a pie chart of Trump’s mind, “a pretty substantial slice is devoted to interior decorating”. He also revealed that Trump is engaged in “design wars” with Melania and moved furniture she had selected into his spaces. The commander-in-chief apparently has even been caught supergluing gilded accents to the Oval Office mantel himself. Though Trump claims taxpayers won’t be on the hook for the costs of his renovations, the New York Times reported that the White House’s 18 major remodeling projects – from the botched Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to the paved-over Rose Garden to the looming “Arc de Trump” – will probably come with a price tag of $1.2bn.
Of course, Trump’s renovation compulsion didn’t start this year. The president celebrated winning his first term, in 2017, by ripping out the Oval Office’s royal blue carpet with the presidential seal and replacing it with a Mar-a-Lago peach version, accented with – what else? – gold. But in his second term, he’s gotten bolder, both politically and aesthetically – and more addicted. By the autumn of his first year back in office, he went ahead and tore down the East Wing entirely.
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And, OK, I get it. In January, my husband and I bought a money pit of a house. In this economy, we counted ourselves lucky. But, within the first 24 hours of ownership, we had a fire, a leak, and the boiler burst, filling the basement with several inches of rusty water. There went the aesthetic tweaks we’d planned, not to mention the furniture. The problem was that my Instagram algorithm had already picked up on my new life stage. Soon, I was plagued by an irrational, unyielding fear of ugly rooms. I wanted nothing but to designmaxx. I began to give up an inordinate amount of my brainpower to rules like: “One throw per sofa, draped not folded. Folded is a store display. Draped is a home.” I actually battled it out with my tween over the “rule of three”. In desperation, one day, encouraged by a Zillow study about which hues raise property values, I painted a room sage green only to realize all my furniture clashed. (I believe they call it “scope creep”.) If, at that moment, I’d been supplied with an Ikea hack for transforming discount chair cushions into a padded room, I would have felt I’d alighted upon the perfect decorating scheme.
In other words, this stuff could make anyone crazy. In one survey, 12% of new couples (together five years or less) considered separating or divorcing during the remodeling process. In another, more than two-thirds of millennials reported moderate to high stress amid remodeling, with 40% saying it strained their relationships. Yet so many of us keep coming back for more. What began with the Puritans and their stonewalls, their European notions of private property, has spawned an entire channel devoted to renos. On HGTV, the Property Brothers alone have 10 spin-offs. When Edith Wharton tried to sell her interior design guide, The Decoration of Homes, in 1897, it was rejected by publishers. No one, they told her, would be interested. But the interior design market hit over $185bn globally in 2025 – and is projected to reach $298bn by 2033. We are now a nation of open concepts and curb appeal and pops of color, of mid-century and farmhouse sinks and shiplap and Homegoods, homes that look “good”, yes, but often strikingly the same.
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In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino describes a similar homogenizing phenomenon with faces, surgically or AI-enhanced, “increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive”. Trump’s design choices may not be your standard Joanna Gaines style, but, in Washington DC, the decorating analogue for Mar-a-Lago face is massive, gilded anything. All this uniformity is enough to make you long for Jerry Seinfeld’s cluttered cereal shelves or the Friends’ violet walls or even Archie Bunker’s threadbare wing chair.
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Why do any of us put ourselves through this torturous process? Is it all for resale value? To keep up with the Joneses? Or for the positive emotional effects of built environment factors like natural light, wood furniture and high ceilings? Most perplexing of all: why is Trump, in the middle of a war, plunging approval polls and an inflation crisis, devoting mental space to the future of a home he doesn’t even own? Is it a classic response to feeling out of control, or perhaps an attempt at denying reality? (“Like the Administration,” writes Tolentino, “Mar-a-Lago Face locates power in the spectacle of dismissing reality altogether.”) Or is Trump just the most extreme version of our narcissistic instinct to put our stamp on spaces, to claim ownership, like a boy with a Sharpie tagging everything around him?
Unfortunately for our president, one thing I’ve learned is that on the other side of a reno does not always lie satisfaction. Only 52% of couples reported feeling happier in their newly renovated homes. In the HBO show DTF St Louis, the female lead’s raison d’être is a redo of her son’s bedroom decor. Spoiler alert: she gets it but loses a lot more. And Annetta Grant, now an associate professor at Bucknell University, confirmed this kind of disappointment in her 2023 study, with a nod to HGTV’s impact. Americans, she learned, have stopped designing their houses for themselves. Because of home-improvement media (read: everything from Better Homes and Gardens to Pinterest), increasingly, the changes homeowners are making are for resale value, or as she puts it, “a market-reflected gaze” – and that means they decorate in a more and more homogenized style. It’s an approach that leads to anxiety and isolation, as homeowners worry about being judged by visitors at the same time that they don’t feel their homes reflect their own preferences.
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Recently, I started to lust after the kind of homes where no one is thinking about the proper way to size a rug – homes you can relax in, homes covered in Legos and board game pieces. I blocked social media on my phone in an attempt to limit the kinds of Instagram visits that convince me I need a custom monogrammed cross stitch kitchen towel. Instead, I started reading Middlemarch. In it, George Eliot writes that a “betrothed bride” often “dictates” changes to her future home before marriage only to discover: “The mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.” We may think what we want is what we want, but it’s often not what we need at all.
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Trump, for his part, may think what he needs is a new ballroom complete with bunker or just one more gilded vase, when what he really requires is a gut reno of his relationship with himself – and the American public.
