President Donald Trump took aim at the White House’s Lincoln Bathroom, railing against the Truman administration’s design choices while boasting that he had finally made the room “beautiful.”
“It was the worst job,” Trump, 79, said of the White House Lincoln Bathroom during a Saturday evening Oval Office ceremony in which he presented Kennedy Center honorees with medals.
“It was done actually in the Truman administration with a very cheap green tile,” the president added.
The recently renovated Lincoln Bathroom is part of the Lincoln Bedroom, which has borne the 16th president’s name since 1945, when President Harry S. Truman decided Lincoln-era furniture should be placed there, according to the White House Historical Association.
In October, Trump announced that the pale green-tiled bathroom had been renovated and transformed by him into a marble-filled, gold-accented space.
The bathroom was the only area not refurbished under First Lady Laura Bush in 2005, who worked with Lincoln-era specialists to create a more accurate 1860s decor for the Lincoln Bedroom.
Announcing the renovated bathroom, the president wrote on Truth Social that the previous design was “totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era,” and that his “black and white polished Statuary marble” was “very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”
“It feels like a modern-day interpretation of a traditional hotel bathroom but without the architectural soul,” Paul Wiseman, founder and president of San Francisco-based interior design firm, told the Washington Post about what Trump deemed not a “cheap” looking bathroom design.
The announcement came the same month Trump began demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build his $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom, which is projected to overshadow the Executive Residence.
Since returning to the White House for his second term, the often-called “Builder-in-Chief” has redone the Rose Garden paving where grass once grew, installed two giant flagpoles on the grounds, and added gold wherever he could to decorate the residence.
“People said, why is he wasting time, but that’s not wasting time,” the president said on Saturday about his bathroom re-design. “That’s saving our heritage,” he added.
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