President Donald Trump has officially christened the newly paved-over Rose Garden with an inaugural dinner for Republican supporters he dubbed the “Rose Garden Club.”
“We call it the Rose Garden Club,” Trump told guests in the parking lot-style setting on Friday. “It’s a club for senators, for congresspeople and for people in Washington, and frankly, people that can bring peace and success to our country.”
The gathering of around 100 people, mostly House Republicans and some GOP senators, included Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick and Congressmen Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Bryan Steil (R-WI) were also in attendance.
The dinner is the first event to take place in the Rose “Garden” after Trump tore up its iconic grass in June. He justified the change by claiming it would make it easier for “women, with the high heels,” to use the space.
Trump doubled down on this explanation on Friday night, telling his assembled allies that the grass in the former garden “was not usable. Every time we’d have a press conference, women in particular were sinking deep into the mud and at some point I said, ‘You know it’s time to make the change.’”
A dinner on Thursday with tech and business leaders, including Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg, was planned as the inaugural concrete garden event but had to be moved indoors due to rain.
“I had the high-tech guys here, and they didn’t want to have rain on top of their beautiful heads,” Trump told lawmakers.
The renovated plaza was roundly trashed upon its reveal, with critics claiming that Trump has “no sense of beauty, poetry, or music, no sense of national pride, no wit, no knowledge, no humanity, only narcissism and ignorance.”
A garden has been a feature of the White House since 1902, when First Lady Edith Roosevelt created a colonial-style garden. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson’s wife Ellen turned the existing space into a rose garden.
In 1961, it was revamped by Jackie Kennedy, in collaboration with landscaper Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, and it retained her style until earlier this year.
When asked by social media users, Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, ripped into the “ugly” redesign.
“The excessive paving turns an iconic garden into a sterile plaza, stripping away the natural charm and vibrancy that defined the Rose Garden,” Grok wrote on X. “Functionality over beauty isn’t always progress.”
The Rose Garden paving is just one part of Trump’s wider White House makeover. Having plastered the Oval Office in Mar-a-Lago-style gilding, which appears to be seeping into the garden, construction is set to begin on a vast $200 million ballroom.
It will replace much of the East Wing and is the first structural change to the White House since 1948. Public tours of the White House are currently on hold while Trump’s bold new ballroom is being built.
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