ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — For President Donald Trump, what’s good is gold.
The gold-covered furnishings at his casinos and hotels. The golden script and trinkets that increasingly adorn the West Wing. The “golden era” he has proclaimed for America in his second term as president.
But on Wednesday night, Trump will dine at what he acknowledges as the gold standard: Versailles, the enormous, gilded French palace that was home to Louis XIV, the self-appointed Sun King whose embrace of golden grandeur has long fascinated the U.S. president. French President Emmanuel Macron invited Trump to join him at the palace, about 15 miles southwest of Paris, in a bid to extend the U.S. president’s stay in France.
Trump, who arrived in France on Monday for the Group of Seven summit that wraps up Wednesday afternoon, is notorious for his abrupt departures from international gatherings. White House officials last week said that it wasn’t yet decided whether he would extend his trip to dine at Versailles, but the U.S. president told reporters that the invitation was too alluring to pass on.
“I’m a fan of beautiful places,” Trump said Tuesday at the G-7 summit here. “And Versailles is not a gold leaf. Versailles is the real deal.”
The French palace embodies many of the qualities that Trump has long sought to associate with himself — wealth, prestige and power — as he built a personal brand designed to project luxury and command attention. Like Louis XIV centuries ago, who took his father’s hunting lodge and increasingly expanded and bedazzled it, Trump has used golden adornments and metaphors to convince the world of his success.
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump said in January 2025, moments after taking the oath to serve as president again. Gold-themed changes to the White House soon followed.
And in his second term, the president has embarked on his own bucket list of golden-years achievements — becoming the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl and the NBA Finals, to drive a lap at the Daytona 500, and to win FIFA’s inaugural “peace prize‚” a combination of golden statue and golden medal. Trump’s dinner at Versailles also represents his second invitation to be honored at a European palace in nine months.
Trump and his critics have frequently invoked Versailles across his long career in business and politics — for different reasons.
For the president, the French palace is a model for his own construction projects, from its Corinthian columns to its ample use of gold leaf. Trump’s renovation of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida also included an expansive ballroom explicitly inspired by the palace, he said in a 2005 interview with Florida Design magazine.
“I modeled the interior after Versailles, and there is nothing like it in the United States,” Trump said at the time. Two decades later, his planned White House ballroom bears its own marks of Louis XIV’s influence, from soaring ceilings to gilded elements.
Architectural critics and designers have for years called Trump’s use of gold overdone and ostentatious — a complaint long leveled at Louis XIV, too. The president’s gilded Trump Tower penthouse has been parodied in pop culture; his descent on a golden escalator, to announce his campaign for president, was considered a spectacle. Ahead of his first inauguration in 2017, some feared Trump would turn the White House into a Golden one.
Outside of some changes to the Oval Office, that largely did not happen during Trump’s first stint in Washington. But in his second term, the president has sought to leave his gilded mark on the building long known as “The People’s House” — installing gold decorations around the Oval Office, golden script on the West Wing’s walls, gold fixtures in the Lincoln bathroom and golden picture frames of past presidents.
He has also pursued structural changes, such as adding an expansive ballroom and redoing the West Wing, that reflect his own tastes and ambitions.
A wide array of preservationists, historians, designers and politicians have charged Trump with acting not as a duly elected representative, but as a king seeking to remake his court. During last year’s government shutdown, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called Trump’s planned White House ballroom a “knockoff Versailles” that he was attending to rather than focusing on issues such as federal food assistance.
Trump could spend his time fighting childhood hunger, reforming healthcare, or building affordable housing. Instead, he’s focused on turning the White House into Versailles. His billionaire buddies get a tacky ballroom to feast on champagne & caviar. The rest of us? Let them eat… pic.twitter.com/X5gAfiODk0
— Rep. Jim McGovern (@RepMcGovern) August 2, 2025
Debbie Millman, chair of the graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has compared Trump’s planned White House ballroom to Louis XIV’s extravagant vision for Versailles, too.
“The nation’s most enduring building will be reshaped in the image of Mr. Trump, one defined by over-the-top opulence, exaggerated scale and a preference for size over subtlety,” Millman wrote in the New York Times last year.
Asked about Trump’s affection for gold and Versailles, the White House referred to the president’s previous comments. He has spoken extensively about what shaped his tastes and ambitions, and as Trump enters his ninth decade, he has become more reflective about the mark he has sought to make.
“My father was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens, and we built middle-income and low-income housing,” he said at a September 2015 event in South Carolina during his campaign for president. “I said, ‘Pop … I want to build buildings in Manhattan’ … and I ended up doing the Grand Hyatt Hotel in 42nd Street and Trump Tower and many, many buildings, [the] Trump Palace.”
Foreign leaders, many now a decade into their relationship with Trump, have perfected their appeals to the mercurial U.S. leader. (The French president has said that he invited Trump to dinner to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary — an event of personal significance to the U.S. president.)
Trump has long shown less enthusiasm for the rituals of multilateral diplomacy than many of his predecessors. He often prefers direct leader-to-leader engagement over lengthy negotiations and carefully crafted joint statements, and he has repeatedly cut international gatherings short.
In 2018, Trump departed the G-7 summit in Quebec before its conclusion to travel to Singapore for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, then withdrew U.S. support for the summit’s joint communiqué while aboard Air Force One. Last year, he left the G-7 in Canada a day early as the conflict between Israel and Iran intensified, scrapping planned meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
“I wish I could stay for tomorrow, but they understand,” Trump said before departing.
Yet Trump’s presence still lends weight to the united front the G-7 seeks to project to rivals such as China and Russia, helping explain why organizers have gone to unusual lengths to keep him engaged. British leaders also invited Trump to Windsor Castle last year for an unprecedented second state visit — a gesture steeped in history, symbolism and personal attention.
“Everybody knows Trump loves the pageantry,” Victor Cha, president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters at a briefing last week.
Macron is “trying to entice and schedule things at the Palace of Versailles and other places to try to keep Trump engaged,” Cha added.
Trump said this week that extending his schedule for a chance to see Versailles was an easy trade.
“I’d like to do it,” he told reporters. “All it means is that I get home later … and I’m not a big sleeper, anyway.”
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