ABC News reports: President Trump shows off White House’s Lincoln Bathroom renovated entirely in marble.
President Donald Trump isn’t just remaking the East Wing of the White House. On Friday, he showed off an entirely renovated Lincoln Bathroom — white marble with gold accents — on his social media platform.
“I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social alongside photos of the before and after. “It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.”
He continued, “I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”
He also posted about the Kennedy Center renovations.
I am struck by the fact that I cannot imagine any previous administration, regardless of political party, wherein the US could be in the middle of a shutdown and where the President could breezily be engaged in a variety of vanity projects, and it would just be some side note.
All of this is also from the guy who was allegedly going to tackle fraud and waste, and yet there is always money for whatever project Trump wants.
I continue to laugh at the notion that the mainstream press is allied with Democrats or “the left” in any way.
I realize that this is all, to a degree, dog bites man, because Trump is Trump (and nothing says “Trump” like gaudy renovations), but by the same token, this is not normal behavior for a President of the United States.
Normal political gravity would normally mean that when millions of Americans are facing massive increases in costs for insurance, as well as losing food assistance, bragging about the new marble in the bathroom with the gold-plated fixtures would be bad form. Even more so when you are a president who has done nothing, even performative, let alone substantive, to try to solve the shutdown.
Indeed, as James Joyner noted today, SNAP is mandatory spending, and Trump’s attempt to forestall that spending is, yet again, an example of him trying to ignore the legislative branch.
On that topic, I would share the following from Heather Cox Richardson:
Yesterday a reporter asked Representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado, about the administration’s withholding of reserve funds Congress intended would fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we come to November first, and these contingency funds haven’t been released, if nothing has been accomplished in restoring SNAP benefits, will you call on your Democratic colleagues to reopen the government and deal with these shutdown crises immediately?”
Neguse called out the dynamic in which observers refuse to hold President Donald J. Trump and MAGA Republicans to account and instead demand Democrats step in to fix whatever crisis is at hand. “The basis for your question is, and maybe the better way to state it would be, if the Trump administration continues to violate the law, if the Trump administration unlawfully refuses to release funds so that families in Colorado don’t go hungry, if the Trump administration refuses to follow the law, as they have for the better course of the last nine months, violating statute after statute, if in that scenario these actions unfold, then how will Democrats respond?” Neguse answered.
“That [in] my view would be a more fair characterization of the question that you’ve posed,” Neguse continued, “because it does feel a little bit like we’re in the Twilight Zone here with an administration that is lawless, violates the law with impunity, is now doing so with respect to the release of funds for families that may go hungry.”
Twilight Zone, indeed.
BTW: I cannot stress enough how many ads one gets on Truth Social, and that Trump’s ownership of the platform and usage of it as a communication tool is him monetizing the presidency.
