Donald Trump has a lot on his plate: wars, inflation, plummeting approval ratings. And yet, according to Jonathan Swan, one of the authors of a new tell-all about his second term, a sizable portion of the president's mental real estate is devoted to interior decorating. The two are currently locked in what Swan calls "design wars" over the White House itself.
The president has been busy. He ripped out the Oval Office's royal blue presidential carpet in his first term and replaced it with peach from Mar-a-Lago, edged in gold. In his second term, he's accelerated the pace. The New York Times reports that 18 major White House remodeling projects will probably cost $1.2 billion. There's the botched Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, the paved-over Rose Garden, and the planned "Arc de Trump." Swan revealed that Trump has even been caught supergluing gilded accents to the Oval Office mantel himself. By autumn of his first year back, he tore down the East Wing entirely.
The question nags: Why is the sitting president devoting serious mental energy to redesigning a house he doesn't own while the country burns?
Maybe because he's not alone. In January, my husband and I bought a house. Within 24 hours we had a fire, a leak, and a burst boiler flooding the basement. We were still recovering when Instagram's algorithm caught on to our new life stage, and suddenly I was gripped by an irrational, unyielding terror of ugly rooms. I wanted to designmaxx. I obsessed over rules like "draped throws, not folded" and battled my tween over the "rule of three." When a Zillow study suggested sage green raised property values, I painted a room and watched all my furniture clash. Scope creep, they call it.
The renovation compulsion is not a fringe condition. In one survey, 12 percent of couples married five years or less considered separating or divorcing during a remodeling project. In another, more than two-thirds of millennials reported moderate to high stress, with 40 percent saying it damaged their relationships. Yet we keep coming back.
The interior design industry has become a colossus. When Edith Wharton tried to publish "The Decoration of Homes" in 1897, publishers rejected it. Who would care? Today, the global interior design market topped $185 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $298 billion by 2033. HGTV alone has spawned the Property Brothers and 10 spin-offs. We are now a nation of open concepts, curb appeal, pops of color, farmhouse sinks, and shiplap. Our homes look good, yes, but strikingly the same.
Jia Tolentino recently described a similar phenomenon with faces: surgically or AI-enhanced, they are "increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive." Trump's gilded aesthetic may not be standard Joanna Gaines, but in Washington DC, the decorating equivalent of that enhanced face is massive and gold. All this uniformity makes you long for Jerry Seinfeld's cluttered cereal shelves or the Friends' violet walls or even Archie Bunker's threadbare wing chair.
Is it all for resale value? To keep up with the neighbors? Or do we chase these renovations because we're chasing control in an uncontrollable world? Annetta Grant, an associate professor at Bucknell University, studied this in 2023. She found that Americans have stopped designing houses for themselves. Because of home-improvement media, homeowners increasingly decorate for resale value, for what Grant calls a "market-reflected gaze." The result: homogenized style, anxiety, and isolation. Homeowners worry about judgment from visitors while their homes fail to reflect their own preferences.
Only 52 percent of couples felt happier in their newly renovated homes. Many discovered that the other side of a renovation does not deliver satisfaction. I started blocking social media and reading Middlemarch instead, where George Eliot observes that betrothed brides who "dictate" changes to their future homes often 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."
Trump, surrounded by his gilded vases and new ballrooms, may think he knows what he needs. What he really requires is something no contractor can provide.
Author James Rodriguez: "The real renovation crisis isn't in the White House, it's in the American home, where we've traded authenticity for algorithmic approval."
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