Jemima Kelly of the FT: Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lagoland

Key topics:Trump transforms White House Rose Garden into a stone-paved “club.”Tech billionaires hosted in revamped garden amid luxury-style décor.Renovations criticised as tacky, self-aggrandising, Mar-a-Lago-inspired..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Jemima Kelly.The White House Rose Garden. Just the name alone evokes elegance, pageantry, delicate glamour, formidable power. Commissioned by John F Kennedy in 1961 under the guidance of his uber-chic wife, Jackie, and her good friend Bunny Mellon, the garden has provided the backdrop for many an iconic image — JFK Jr as a toddler in a powder-blue suit in 1963, standing barely taller than the flowers; Queen Elizabeth presenting the Churchill award to George HW Bush in 1991 in a purple straw hat and pearls; Donald Trump in 2017 yelling at an 11-year-old boy who had been given the honour of mowing the lawn.But no longer is there to be any such honour, any such imagery — any such mowing, for that matter. For the Rose Garden lawn has been entirely paved over, replaced with blinding white slabs of limestone, underground lighting and, just to really set off the Tipp-Ex-white paving, Tipp-Ex-white tables and chairs, all topped off with yellow-and-white striped umbrellas that look more like they should be on a beach than in the capital city of the United States of America..Read more:. Markets rally on expectations of Trump White House return.While Trump signed an executive order at the end of August criticising modernism and brutalism and requiring that all federal buildings “embrace classical architecture” and be constructed in a way that “uplifts and beautifies public spaces”, it seems his own renovations are exempt. What was once soft, welcoming and classical is now hard, tacky and clinical. Where there was once a garden there is now a stone wasteland that somehow manages to look like a cross between an ice-skating rink and a giant chess board.What’s more, the White House Rose Garden is now officially — I jest not — The Rose Garden Club. It emerged on Friday that the White House’s South Lawn is to be the setting for an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fight on July 4 next year, as part of the celebrations to mark 250 years since the country’s founding (why not?), but the newly brutalised Rose Garden Club would surely be more fitting.“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world,” a White House spokesman said in a statement this week, ahead of what was due to be this hot new club’s opening night on Thursday: a dinner for two-dozen tech executives including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Open AI founder Sam Altman.But alas, the patio party was not meant to be: due to “inclement weather”, the tech billionaires who turned up for the dinner — Elon Musk says he was invited but declined — were forced to sit in the state dining room as they took turns to ingratiate themselves with the president.I have previously praised Trump for understanding the power of how things look, despite not always sharing his taste. Having Mar-a-Lago as a base during the interregnum years was, I believe, a key factor in his return to power. Not only did living in what is essentially his own fan club sustain him and give him the confidence he needed to have another run at the presidency, but it also allowed him to hold on to an air of importance and prestige even while not in power. And that’s to say nothing of the considerable benefit that comes from having a nice private members’ club for influential tech billionaires to come and hang out at.But he has misfired on this one. And it is not only the Rose Garden that he is hamfistedly attempting to turn into Mar-a-Lagoland. The White House has announced the construction of a huge new gaudy white-and-gold ballroom alongside a “modernised” East Wing. The president has also added several large portraits of himself to the walls and has covered the Oval Office with gilded ornamentation all over the fireplace and the walls. So tacky are these additions, in fact, that there has been online speculation that many of them were purchased at Home Depot. I can see the similarity, though I am not wholly convinced they are identical, and the White House did not respond to my request for confirmation, while Home Depot said it wasn’t “something we’d weigh in on”.Either way, what is clear is that while Trump is attempting to renovate the White House in a way that makes himself look regal and high class, he is managing to do just the opposite. A Mar-a-Lagified White House does not so much conjure up comparisons to Versailles or Buckingham Palace as it does to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s $600mn-plus palace, or the more than 100 of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s palaces, now mostly reduced to rubble.Rather than projecting power, Trump is betraying a sense of desperation — for admiration, for praise and, most of all, for a legacy..© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.

Jemima Kelly of the FT: Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lagoland

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