When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.
This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.
Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantle; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.
When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”
It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one where he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.
Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.
[Read: A decade of golden-escalator politics]
“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.
Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.
“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.
“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”
Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”
Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.
Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”
The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.
Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.
[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]
When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.
Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.
The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.
Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.
As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?
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