President Trump Moves to Make Oval Office a Public Monument

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation THursday seeking to designate the Oval Office and the adjacent Cabinet Room national monuments, saying that the new designation would prevent future administrations from making major modifications without Congressional approval. In his second term, Trump made it a priority to redecorate both, turning the previously restrained presidential working spaces into extravagantly gilded interiors in the style of Louis XIV.

In the wake of this week’s midterm elections, in which Republicans suffered historic defeats, Trump appears to be self-soothing by focusing on the many renovation projects he has initiated at the White House and across Washington, D.C. At the White House, in addition to his makeover of the Oval Office, these have included the construction of a granite helipad on the White House’s South Lawn and, most notoriously, the demolition of the building’s East Wing to make way for a 90,000-square-foot, $600 million ballroom. (On Wednesday, in his first public appearance after Tuesday’s Republican wipeout, Trump led a media tour of the ballroom construction site.)

Around the nation’s capital, Trump has embarked on a fraught, $14 million repair of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, begun the redevelopment of a popular public golf course by cutting down hundreds of trees, and proposed a 250-foot-high triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. Apparently worried that incoming Democrats would block construction of the arch, Trump asked for hastened approval of the project, granted Wednesday by his hand-picked planning commission; that evening, Judge Tanya Chutkan stopped construction for fourteen days.

It is not clear how designating the Oval Office a national landmark will prevent another president from simply revising, or ignoring, the proclamation—the White House is already designated a National Historic Landmark, which has not stopped Trump from building his ballroom. Nevertheless, speaking from the now gold-covered Oval Office, Trump told reporters, “When completed, and when we get the documentation fully done, legally binding, it’ll make it impossible for anybody ever to destroy this incredible space.”