This is an installment of Visual Studies, a series that explores how images move through and shape culture.
Lately the American president has been spending quite a bit of time redecorating the Oval Office. The results can only be called a gilded rococo hellscape. If our leader’s appearance is a depiction of the country …
Is this us?
Since the start of President Trump’s Oval Office decorating spree in February, there has been a steady torrent of articles condemning his design choices. And to be sure, the redesign has been … significant.
There is a parade of golden objects that march across the mantel, relegating the traditional Swedish ivy to a greenhouse. Gilded Rococo wall appliqués, nearly identical to the ones at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, are stuck to the fireplace and office walls with the same level of aesthetic consideration a child gives her doll’s face before covering it in nail polish.
In what appears to be a bid to tie the room together, gilded floral onlays form a chain around the room’s cornice. Even the doorknobs are highly polished, so the presidential seal upon them shines.
Regarding the office’s artwork, Mr. Trump, a man with a more-is-more sensibility, chose what decorators call a gallery hang. A dozen or so gold-framed presidential portraits crawl up the walls of the Oval Office. Just outside his office there’s even a copy of his mug shot printed on the front page of The New York Post.
The most unusual additions to the office are two gilded mirrors that hang on either side of the fireplace. This is so quintessentially Mr. Trump that I’m surprised he didn’t think of it earlier. When standing in front of one, your reflection joins the pantheon of great leaders above you. It’s just like they say: In America anyone can grow up to become president.
In 2017 the journalist Peter York called Mr. Trump’s aesthetic “dictator chic,” likening his New York penthouse to Muammar el-Qaddafi’s homes. Others have looked further back in history for an analogue. Many concluded not only that Mr. Trump’s style is the stuff of kings and despots but also that it’s French.
On one level, they aren’t wrong. The decoration Mr. Trump has splattered across the Oval Office is inspired by European Baroque and Rococo of the 1600s and 1700s, when power was shown through ornate displays of grotesque abundance. Gold leaf moldings and large mirrors filled Baroque palace walls from Versailles to the Peterhof Palace. But in the early 1700s Rococo, an even gaudier style distinct for its asymmetry, swirling tendrils and gilded seashells, was born. Often criticized for being purely decorative and intellectually vacuous, it would become a perfect visual metaphor for the European royal courts of the 18th century: unserious people draped in gold baubles and ruffled pastels.
But Rococo’s most enduring trait has been its embrace by the bourgeoisie. By replacing marble and gold with stucco and gilded bronze, the ornamental splendor once reserved for gods and kings was now available to merchants and a growing middle class. Rococo was itself revolutionary, in part because it upset the established hierarchy by making molded plaster look as good as solid gold. Four hundred years on, its cheap extravagance is still simultaneously elitist and democratic. Use it as a commoner and you can feel like a king. Use it as a king and it might just get you guillotined.
Whatever Mr. Trump is doing to the walls of the Oval Office is not French; it is deeply American. Prerevolutionary America was awash in Rococo design. Even one of America’s most famous revolutionaries, Paul Revere, a silversmith by trade, was known for his Rococo home goods. After the Revolution, like a good patriot, he pivoted to neo-Classicism, a heavy and serious style that is a suitable metaphor for what America wished itself to be: a democracy for the people, not for a king. When we talk about American design, we tend to prefer our neo-Classical fantasy to our gilded one. It’s almost as if we are embarrassed by how much we want to look like kings.
American Rococo is the stuff of bubbles. It hits when the 1 percent is thriving, when government leaders are overconfident and new technology is causing great uncertainty. It celebrates conspicuous consumption and nods to the perceived stability of the past.
The first map of the fledgling United States, from 1784, featured a Rococo corsage of swirling fronds, an American flag and cherubs, all of which would look right at home stuffed in one of Mr. Trump’s office pediments. And Rococo has remained a significant part of the American vernacular ever since. It became a favored embellishment for American guns, stoves, radiators and, when the first cash registers started emerging in 1879, well, of course, many of them were Rococo chic, too.
By the time Mr. Trump was born in June 1946, a Rococo revival was coming for postwar America. Home design magazines were filled with advertisements for chiffon curtains that draped like ruffled queens’ sleeves. Modern rooms were full of 18th-century reproduction furniture, bowlegged and ornately embellished. Silverware sets were edged in swooping florets and seashells. In women’s fashion, Christian Dior’s “new look” would bring back exaggerated female silhouettes with small waists and full ruffled skirts, a shape last popular in the 1800s.
But by 1960 the hard lines of midcentury modernism filled those same magazines. For the rest of the 20th century Rococo was a bit player, fading in and out of fashion. Not until the turn of the millennium did Americans go full Rococo all over again.
In 1997, after tremendous financial losses, Mr. Trump released the book “The Art of the Comeback.” The cover featured a portrait of him pouting at the camera in front of a flinty gold background, and its interior was stuffed with dropped names and braggadocious renderings of his business exploits. That year his gilded penthouse was a stand-in for a fictional billionaire’s in the film “The Devil’s Advocate.” All this was meant to display that famous people do, in fact, like him, that he was as important as he ever was and that, no matter the financial losses, the name Trump was still synonymous with ostentatious wealth.
In 1998, The New York Times summarized the latest trends in fashion. Among them: “ruffles, fringe and asymmetrical hems,” “Ivanka Trump” and “religion (celebrity worship).” When Mr. Trump stormed back, Rococo did, too.
As it turns out, Rococo was the perfect visual accompaniment for a moment that lasted for the next two decades. Over the next few years, new technology would reshape the middle class and a tiny handful of Americans would become very, very rich. Some of those rich Americans became TV stars. There were shows documenting the lives of millionaires — “The Simple Life” (2003), “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” (2007) — and shows where Americans tried to become millionaires — “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” (1999), “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” (2000). And of course there was a show that was both: “The Apprentice” (2004). On reality TV we witness baroque story lines and frivolous drama, the collision of high society and low art and, of course, performative wealth’s obvious facade.
That is, until the stock market crash of 2008 had a sobering effect, and the backlash to these millionaires’ royal extravagance was sharp, for a time.
Right before the 2016 election, Fran Lebowitz called Mr. Trump “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” On the campaign trail, he didn’t look or sound like the rest of the new American billionaires. He wasn’t polished or smooth. His appearance was shoddy, strange, lacking all polish. And all that gold in his house? Well, yes, it looked fake. It was Rococo. He was a normal guy self-consciously performing wealth, something Americans had been doing for the previous 20 years. Not to mention the past 240.
Last year, trend forecasters predicted Rococo’s return. There had been hints it was coming for years. The buzzy shoe in 2021 was a jelly mule reminiscent of the shoe Marie Antoinette is said to have lost on the way to the guillotine. In 2022, when the neo-Rococo artist Flora Yukhnovich’s painting sold at auction for over $3 million, critics trumpeted the return of Rococo art. Rococo was on fashion runways in 2023 and 2024 and was so prominent on Pinterest that, by 2025, Target got in on the action, posting a Rococo trend board pointing shoppers to gilded mirrors and pastel cherubs. The pattern running behind the products was a light gray damask almost identical to the wallpaper that hangs in Mr. Trump’s Oval Office.
In November a country enamored (again) with populist wealth elected (again) a Rococo president. In Mr. Trump’s America, everything is gold. Our new $175 billion missile defense shield? It’s a Golden Dome, of course. And from the looks of the 3-D renderings it will turn the whole country into a shimmering gilded cheese platter. Want to come to America on the EB-5 immigrant investor visa? Surely you mean Mr. Trump’s gold card. Unlike the last version, it costs $5 million, but it does allow you to skip paying U.S. taxes on your overseas income.
So, is this us?
There is something very American about a man who wants to be both king and revolutionary. And there’s something very American about the lust for gold. We shouldn’t forget that large swaths of this nation were developed and destroyed because of it. And we shouldn’t forget that our wealth has often been used not for communal betterment but to enrich the self.
This spring Mr. Trump invited the Fox News host Laura Ingraham into the Oval Office to show off his redecorating skills. He pointed to the Rococo décor. “People have tried to come up with a gold paint that would look like gold, and they have never been able to do it,” he told her. “That’s why it’s gold.”
But those of us watching at home know how time always reveals that Rococo is just gilded plaster. Unfortunately for America, we like it that way.
Emily Keegin is a photo editor and a creative consultant based in Northern California.
Top art: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times; Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Saul Loeb/AFP, via Getty Images; Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Evan Vucci/Associated Press; Eric Lee/The New York Times.
Credits from top: Eric Lee/The New York Times; Eric Thayer for The New York Times; Saul Loeb/AFP, via Getty Images; Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times; Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; Alain Jocard/AFP, via Getty Images; MET/BOT, via Alamy; Bettman/Getty Images; Bettmann/Getty Images; Loomis Dean/The Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock; Warner Bros.; PhotoNews International Inc./Getty Images; NBC News Archives, via Getty Images; Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby’s; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Eric Lee/The New York Times.
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