The White House is full of so much rich history and tradition — it helps tell the story of America itself. And it’s an incredibly impressive and intimidating venue for facilitating international diplomacy.
As Michael Douglas’ President Andrew Shepherd says in “The American President,” “The White House is the single greatest home court advantage in the modern world.”
President Trump understands the value of first impressions, even (and especially) if they’re not painting an accurate picture. He may have put gold leaf in his NYC bathrooms, but he also inflated the value of his properties and his own net worth for years. He famously pretended to be his own spokesman to appear more established. He’s sold everything from luxury ties to luxury homegoods, most of which were made cheaply in China.
For Trump, you can forget if it’s genuine or not — it just has to look rich.
So no one should be surprised that on his second-go-round at president, he decided the White House — the people’s house — needed the Trump touch, too. Not known for subtlety, Trump’s already made noticeable changes, painting over fixtures in the Oval Office a garish gold, and festooning the place with gold vases, trophies, and coasters.
And now he’s building a new ballroom, much like the one he uses at Mar-a-Lago to host his corporate and political pals.
The new ballroom will cost $250 million, and Trump insists that it’s being entirely funded by private donors. With his penchant for misleading about his own expenditures, I guess we’ll just have to take his word for it.
But as America watches aghast that the White House East Wing is being torn up, Trump is reveling in the destruction…er, construction. At a Tuesday press conference he moaned, “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back. You hear that sound? Oh, that’s music to my ears. I love that sound. Other people don’t like it. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.”
It’s not hard to see why. Trump’s used the office of the presidency to rake in the cash, boosting his personal net worth by a record $3 billion just since 2024.
According to Forbes: “No president has used his position of power to profit as immensely as Trump.” He’s primarily done that with a crypto venture he announced last September named World Liberty Financial, and a memecoin, all of which he helped make possible by rolling back regulations and signing favorable legislation. How convenient.
But that’s not all.
He’s announced a new “Arc de Trump,” a structure that will be built across from the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary. We don’t know how much it will cost or who is paying for it.
He’s refurbishing a $400 million Qatari plane he was “gifted” in May, which is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion. Trump says he’s donating the plane to his presidential library foundation.
A New York Times report this week alleged Trump is asking the Justice Department to pay him $230 million personally, over its investigations into him, an idea he later defended.
This is all happening while the government is shut down, and costing taxpayers $15 billion a week. And it’s happening as Trump just handed Argentina a $20 billion bailout while American farmers suffer under his dumb trade war. And it’s happening while 22 U.S. states are either in a recession or on the brink. Trump doesn’t care.
Of course, fleecing the American people isn’t new for him.
Last year, the House Oversight Committee revealed Trump was charging more than a thousand bucks a night on the taxpayers’ credit card so that Secret Service agents protecting his family could stay at Trump hotels.
After lying about the results of the 2020 election, he fleeced his own supporters, encouraging donations to help “Stop the Steal,” donations which he then used to pay his own legal bills and Melania’s stylist.
From golden sneakers to Trump Bibles, he’ll get his hands on Americans’ money any way he can.
But Trump is stuck in the 1980s — both in terms of his gaudy interior design aesthetic and his assumption of where the American economy is. He may learn in the midterms that greed isn’t as good as it was for Gordon Gecko when his voters can’t afford gas or groceries.
Or maybe he’s stuck in the 1780s, his faux-French “Arc de Trump” a fond homage to the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whose lavish spending while their people starved prompted an actual revolution.
Will Americans tire of Trump’s excess as they struggle to meet basic needs while he shrugs and says, “Let them eat crypto?”
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.