Donald Trump is not known for his commitment to conservation. But a new plan under discussion has shown that in the midst of a stalemate with Iran, a burgeoning row with Nato over the withdrawal of US forces from Poland and an irate US public fretting over the cost of living in a midterm election year, the President is increasingly focused on the next tranche of White House upgrades.
Trump is now reportedly considering installing a new helipad at the White House, supposedly to keep presidential helicopters from damaging the South Lawn’s grass.
This innovation might even have something useful to it. The Marine One helicopters being used to ferry the President around are powerful Sikorsky/Lockheed machines – prone to occasionally scorching the pristine lawns in front of the White House. A helipad would enable lighter crafts to land.
But it’s hard to create a discreet helipad, and Trump, since he announced his first run for the presidency in 2015 by descending in a gilded escalator in Trump Tower, has been leaning heavily into the oligarchic architecture playbook.
The helipad would be part of a massive and costly makeover of the presidential offices and residence, not to mention the larger landscape of Washington DC.
It’s possible Trump was inspired by the example of a grandiose upgrade to the German Chancellor’s residence and offices, which will have a rooftop helipad from next year. That move has been heavily criticised as an unnecessary extravagance in Berlin.
Then again, a man whose aesthetic always leaned heavily on his appetite for bling as a property developer in New York – and whose Mar-a-Lago complex is dotted with grandiose touches, statues and swimming pools – doesn’t need much encouragement to take a sledgehammer to existing features.
The US President has a burning desire to leave his mark on everything he touches.
From paving Eleanor Roosevelt’s Rose Garden in order to create an outdoor patio space – easier for stiletto-heeled guests – to what is coyly called the “East Wing modernisation project” but is in reality the construction of a $400m ballroom funded by billionaire supporters and companies hoping to curry favour, Trump is committing huge amounts of time and resources to recreating the White House in his own image.
Donald Trump holds plans for the new ballroom. The construction will cost $400m. (Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty)When Trump replaced an art deco bathroom with a black-and-white marble one with glinting fittings, he posted on social media that it would have found favour with Abraham Lincoln, because marble was more aligned with the designs of “1850 and civil wars and all of the problems”.
Underlying this frenetic domestic improvement push by a second-term President is a telling statement of where Trumpian priorities lie, and how often they appear to be distractions from the more testing matters of dealing with world affairs.
The official excuse, as a White House spokesman put it, is that the renovations “benefit future presidents and Americans”. After the recent White House correspondents’ dinner, when I watched Trump being hustled offstage after a gunman tried to get in, Trump claimed that had his ballroom already existed “this never would have happened”.
But the President’s attention is being subsumed by such details at arguably one of the most critical periods in recent US foreign policy.
The decision to attack Iran, with the inconclusive fallout and economic backwash in oil and gas prices, would leave any other leader focused on how to get out of the mess. But the Trump administration is markedly different from its predecessors, and the President sets his own iconoclastic priorities, regardless of what else might be happening.
Trump is now veering between war room meetings with huge implications for the global economy to sessions on the minutiae of the ballroom complex, as well as decisions over the helipad and whether granite features should be black or grey.
Donald Trump speaks to journalists as he makes his way to board Marine One before departing from the South Lawn of the White House (Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty)As one former member of his personal staff told me, Trump has “a phenomenal attention to detail – even down to the lettering on a building or a door handle – when it is a passion project, and none at all if it isn’t”.
Whether to resume attacks on Iran is the big decision the President needs to take, and soon. He can’t afford to keep threatening without taking action. The alternative route is pulling together Gulf allies like Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia in the hope of orchestrating a backdown from Tehran using their pulling power and economic back channels.
Trump is expected to hold a meeting with his national security advisors shortly to discuss further military or off-ramp options.
John Bolton, a former national security advisor who fell out with the President during his first term, told me of Trump last week: “It’s clear to the regime in Iran that he wants out, but he also knows if he makes a bad deal, he’s going to be harmed by it politically. So, he’s trapped and he doesn’t know what to do.”
These are the decisions and deliberations of which historic decisions and presidential memoirs are made – high risk, high reward.
Not many occupants of the West Wing would combine them with near-daily attention to what is happening on a pet building project – or indeed whether a reflecting pool renovation ordered to be completed on the National Mall can be hurried along to hit the 250th anniversary of American Independence deadline. But such is life in the zig-zag attention world of the current US President.
All of this leaves even some exhausted Republicans worrying that the chief White House resident might be more concerned with the decor than global security – or indeed, that having done all the fixtures and fittings, he may be loathed to leave the place when his term is up.
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