President Donald Trump made a speech to first responders in the Rose Garden Thursday—and spent his time talking about “reskinning” the White House.
After rambling about the upcoming midterm elections and briefly thanking the first responders gathered there for lunch, the president quickly pivoted to describing his pet White House construction projects.
“It’s all perfect now. So we reskinned, basically. It’s a reskinning,” Trump said, looking around the Rose Garden like he’d never seen it before. “And that building is good to go for another 100 years, at least, actually. But even this, you see the, the top sections were—it was so bad I didn’t even like standing under it, the thing was all cracked and broken, all over the place. We put the sign up, solid brass, half-inch thick, as opposed to laminate. You ever see these laminate? They don’t want to spend the money on the brass so they have a piece of brass laminated, just about one-hundredth of an inch thick, and they put in on a piece of wood to save a lot of money.”
Trump, of course, has made no attempt to save money pursuing his vanity projects in the people’s house. Not only did he pave over the original Rose Garden to build a sterile patio (and to ostensibly make it easier for women wearing heels, he claimed Thursday), but he also renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway using white granite, covered the Oval Office in gaudy gold, gutted the Lincoln Bathroom, built and then rebuilt a new helipad, and demolished the East Wing to build a $600 million White House ballroom. The building has indeed been “reskinned”—in Trump’s own image.
A clinical psychologist recently signaled that the president’s endless obsession with his construction project might be a sign of cognitive decline.