As you’d expect, the right is in a shambles right now. Elon Musk is making jokes about his “election-interfering space lasers” and pretending that he really, really doesn’t care that he threw away nearly half a billion dollars trying to influence the midterms. JD Vance is writing long essays on social media about how he agrees the Iran war was a bit of an oopsie.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, seems to be going through his own idiosyncratic grieving process about the Republicans’ historic midterm beating. The president has skipped all the way past shock, denial and anger and landed at the “admiring my beautiful renovations” stage of grief.
In his very first public appearance after the midterms, Trump did not offer a path forward for the Republicans or unpack what went wrong. Instead, he stood at the construction site where the new White House ballroom will be built and waxed lyrical about how incredible the building will be.
“This has been a structure the likes of which has never been seen anywhere,” Trump told the press corps as a building crew prepared to install the final beam in the ballroom. He then spent more than 20 minutes talking about “magnificent columns”, marble floors, cocktail rooms and Corinthian design.
Finally, in great detail, he explained what the public was so desperate to know: why were the ballroom’s kitchens going to be underground? “If I put the kitchen on top, you would lose three walls, because a kitchen takes about 30% of the space,” Trump noted.
“I love construction,” the president added, before signing a beam with a black Sharpie.
The midterms did eventually come up, but only because reporters insisted on asking about all that nasty business. “If I were on the ballot, I would have won,” Trump shrugged. I guess he forgot the part where he told voters: “Just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot.” According to a Washington Post analysis, he repeated variations of this statement 63 times.
Trump’s reaction to the midterm loss this week was noticeably different from what it was in 2018. While Republicans may not have been rebuked quite as badly then as they were this year, they still lost the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of that defeat, Trump reacted with his characteristic conspiracy and anger. He called the results a “tremendous success” and insulted his enemies. “Mia Love gave me no love, but then she lost,” Trump said in the 2018 press conference, referring to a Utah Republican who lost her House re-election bid. “Too bad.”
Then again, Trump 2.0, as we have all come to painfully realize, is a very different beast from the first incarnation. While the president’s reaction to Tuesday’s defeat may seem bizarre, it is in keeping with the priorities of his second term. Despite all his threats about running for president again, Trump seems to have accepted that this will be his last stint in the White House and is focused on leaving a legacy. He wants to slap his name on as many things as possible, renovate whatever he can get his little hands on, and build a bunch of self-aggrandizing monuments.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory, just gold everywhere,” Barack Obama joked at a recent Ohio rally, in reference to Trump’s aesthetics obsession. “He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV.”
Trump did not find this particularly amusing. “I paid for it myself. I fixed it, and now it’s more beautiful and in better shape,” the president said in defence of his White House upgrades. Obama, he added, just didn’t get it because he is a man who “doesn’t understand that having asphalt going to your main entrance is not the right thing”.
Trump’s construction projects may soon end up being undermined by more than just jokes. Democrats are already scrutinizing the funding of the ballroom. Now that they control the House and Senate, they could even move to block some of Trump’s building plans, arguing that they haven’t been authorized by Congress and are therefore illegal. And they could clamp down on some of the renovation excesses: despite all his guff about bringing jobs back to America, Trump has outsourced the carving of his ballroom’s Corinthian columns to Italy.
But even if the Democrats manage to rein Trump in, he’s still made an indelible mark on Washington. Work on his 250ft “triumphal arch” could get started this week if a judge gives approval. And the president has just wrapped up a $14m project to clean up the “filthy” Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rid of the algae blooms turning it green.
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It’s been a long and difficult battle against the algae but, in a press conference on Monday, the eve of election day, Trump declared “mission accomplished”. In the last press conference before polls opened, Trump did not make a final plea to voters – instead he patted himself on the back about how wonderful the pool was looking. Standing in front of a sign that said: “Back, and more beautiful than ever!” Trump declared that the pool project should unite all Americans. As voters, angry about the price of groceries and gas, prepared to register their anger at the voting booth, Trump held up pictures of rusted pipes and explained the virtues of painting the pool “American flag blue”.
And look, I’ve got to give the president his due. The water does look a bit clearer now. And it’s certainly doing more reflecting than the president is.
