You may have seen that President Donald Trump has been doing some remodeling around the White House, including a new Rose Garden patio and so, so much gold in the Oval Office. My colleague Abdallah Fayyad recently wrote about how that remodeling isn’t just a presidential whim — instead, it’s the most immediate representation of Trump’s efforts to rebrand America in his image.
I sat down with Abdallah to talk about that rebranding for Vox’s daily newsletter Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can also sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
You write that Trump is remodeling America. What does that look like?
One thing that I’ve been interested in about Trump for a long time is his whole aesthetic, how tacky it can be, and how much he flaunts his wealth and power in the most ostentatious ways. We saw this in his first term, and we’re seeing it again in his second term, in how he’s imposing his particular style onto the American public, most recently with his makeover of the White House, all the gold in the Oval Office, planning a $200 million ballroom extension to the East Wing. It’s all done in Trump style. It mimics his residences, be it his penthouse in New York or Mar-a-Lago.
I was thinking about how he is more than just a political figure. Trump is, whether we like it or not, a cultural icon and has been for a long time. Understanding the cultural element of Trump — how he portrays himself in the media, his ostentatious displays, understanding that aspect of his presidency or his personality — really helps inform us about his broader political project as president of the United States.
The way that Trump is ultimately rebranding America is to so deeply intertwine himself with the state so that we can’t separate the two and so that he becomes the most enduring symbol of America. And there’s a very particular kind of America that he wants to be the symbol of, and that’s his broader vision for how he’s rebranding America.
You mentioned some of the examples of the redecorations. Where is this all coming from? What’s the Trump aesthetic?
To really understand Trump’s style and his taste, what he values, you have to go back to when he was catapulted into the American zeitgeist through sheer force of will. That’s New York in the 1980s and, specifically, the lifestyles of the rich and famous in New York in the 1980s. Everything that we know that Trump values today, whether it’s Time magazine covers, television ratings, things like that — all of those were markers of clout in that time and place, and he has been chasing that kind of clout since then, and he has never really let go.
That era, specifically, was defined by greed. It was defined by these ostentatious displays of wealth, these attention-grabbing attempts to flaunt your wealth. And Trump has never really shied away or been coy about how wealthy he is. That’s how he has tried to ingratiate himself with the elite circles of American society, with the upper echelons of American society. And, you know, he’s always kind of viewed himself maybe as an outsider, even though he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But he has this kind of vulgar impulse to just flaunt his wealth and power as a way to prove that he has made it, that he is the elite of the elites.
He had long had this obsession with having the tallest and biggest buildings in the world. He has had this obsession with putting his name in gold on everything that he builds. He puts his name on everything; he wants to be everywhere. And I think that that defines the cultural aspect of Trump himself, which is that Trump was never just interested in fame.
He doesn’t just want to be a celebrity. He just wants to be everywhere. And so, when you think about Trump that way, it’s not that he just wants to become president; he wants you to think about him. He wants you to see him. What he really has always been chasing his entire adult life has been omnipresence.
What does this sort of fixation mean for his policy agenda?
A lot of this rebrand, I think, has sinister motives. There’s a certain type of America that Trump is only comfortable associating with. There are sides of America that Trump doesn’t like to be associated with. The specific America that Trump does not want to be associated with is the America that elected Barack Obama, the kind of multiracial, cross-class coalition that formed a decisive majority in 2008 and 2012.
Part of this rebrand is to fundamentally challenge what it means to be an American. We see this through this kind of everlasting nostalgia for a whiter America that permeates Trump’s White House. We see this through his harsh immigration crackdowns. We see this through his censorship of speech. We see this with the kowtowing to Trump by businesses, or universities, or media conglomerates.
The first aspect of this rebrand is to change how America is perceived and what the typical American way of life is, and one tangible example of this is looking at his takeover of the Kennedy Center. He’s kind of trying to dictate the kind of art that Americans should enjoy. He wants to change American gender norms. Masculinity is very much intertwined with that image of America. He’s trying to change American culture, and this has real impacts on people’s lives. It really informs his policy approach, be it through targeting transgender people, targeting immigrants, targeting American citizenship itself — those are the tangible ways we’re seeing this rebrand manifest.
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